Announcement of Parsing Timeline 3.1

[Jeffrey Kegler]

My newest blog post is my announcement of my "Parsing: a Timeline", version 3.1.

"It is a painless introduction to a fascinating and important story which is scattered among one of the most forbidding literatures in computer science. Previous versions of this timeline have been, by far, the most popular of my writings.

"A third of Timeline 3.1 is new, added since the 3.0 version. Much of the new material is adapted from previous blog posts, both old and recent. Other material is completely new. The sections that are not new with 3.1 has been carefully reviewed and heavily revised."

[Rocky]

Looking at the bibliography, I am reminded of a book I recall being interesting at the time by James McKeeman et al which described an early parser generator system using mixed-precidence parsing (mixes LL and some LR)..

A number of programming languages support parsing as part of their pattern matching. An early language that did this was SNOBOL4. You'll find a parser for example in James Gimpel's Algorithms in SNOBOL4 which is also fascinating for some of the other algorithms in the book. Haskell is another language that I believe handles parsing as a natural extension of its unification pattern matching.