Matthew Might and David Darais paper titled “Yacc is dead.” in http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5023 is receiving a lot of attention (see the discussions in "Lambda the Ultimate" and Russ Cox (the author of Google's Go language).

The paper starts with a harsh critique of the practice of parsing context free languages with (not-really-)regular expressions in languages like Perl.

It uses the term, apparently introduced by Larry Wall, “cargo cult parsing” to refer to the use of cut and paste imitation and copying “magic” regular expressions.

The paper says that people abuse regular expressions instead of turning to tools like yacc because

“regular expressions are `WYSIWYG'—the language described is the language that gets matched—whereas parser-generators are WYSIWYGIYULR(k)—`what you see is what you get if you understand LR(k).'"

What is your opinion on the subject?

Should we run to implement the derivative parsers described in the paper in Perl?

How does it relate to current Perl parsers?

In reply to Yacc is dead by casiano

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