Parsing with Derivatives
Why Hacker News recommends it
Mentioned as a great talk and related reading in threads on parsing techniques.
What it is
A Stanford talk by Matthew Might on parsing with derivatives, a new way to write parsers, and why better parsing tools are needed. It discusses language theory and criticizes ad-hoc hand-written parsers.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends cellularmitosis · 2018-09 · on “A Battle Plan for a War on Rare Diseases: Conversation with Matt Might”
Off topic, but he also gave a great talk on parsing with derivatives [this video] which was used by the clojure team [LINK]
Cites joe_the_user · 2016-06 · on “On the Complexity and Performance of Parsing with Derivatives”
Yes, I'm scanning the original video introducing derivatives[1]. The need for parsing is ubiquitous yet, Never mind CS students, in my experiences a significant number of professional programmers cannot create a basic parser either from scratch or from a standard tool. Edit: The video picks on hand-written c parser. Such a thing isn't necessarily bad IF it's in a formally derived recursive descent parser. But just ad-hoc parsing without being informed by a grammar is pretty much waiting for disaster. [1] [this video]
Cites ThatGeoGuy · 2023-05 · on “Why Split Lexing and Parsing into Two Separate Phases?”
In addition to this, I always think about Matt Might's "Parsing with Derivatives." [1] I'll have to read about flap, as it seems to utilize a lexer based on derivatives. [1]: [this video]