in reply to Yacc is dead

Should we run to implement the derivative parsers described in the paper in Perl?
I don't care what you do, but why do you even consider asking me to do it? I guess from the way of phrasing the question is that you see a case for people to implement derivated parsers, but I don't see it, and you don't share your views. All you do is briefly summarize a paper, and then ask whether we should rally.

Come on man, if you have views strong enough you consider a mobilization of Perl programmers, spit them out. Be vocal. Write a paper. Publish it. Write some more. Get people behind whatever views you have. *THEN* come back to organize an army.

Personally, I don't give a flying fuck whether someone states that yacc is dead. Or whether that someone has opinions about parsers written in Perl.

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Re^2: Yacc is dead
by casiano (Pilgrim) on Dec 08, 2010 at 22:30 UTC
    There was a short paper in Inforum 2010 analyzing the current state of parsers in Perl. See Parser Generation in Perl: an Overview and Available Tools by Hugo Areias et al.

    They conclude:

    Parser generators in Perl still lacks valuable mechanisms to make them challengeable when compared with other languages, like C. There is no valid support for attribute grammars and, according to the research made, there is only one module on CPAN that supports attribute grammars that, however, lacks of maintenance for several years now.

    I have tried myself to improve yacc-like conflict resolution mechanism with a new mechanism called "Postoponed Conflict Resolution" (PPCR). You can see how it is used in several Eyapp examples, See the following files in the t/ directory of the Eyapp distribution:
    1. dynamic.eyp
    2. pascalnestedeyapp3
    3. CplusplusNested2.eyp
    The first shows how you can use PPCR to dynamically change the parsing and consequently the abstract syntax trees on the fly.

    The second solves the problem of enumerated types versus range types that appears in Extended Pascal. It has been used in the Bison manual to illustrate the power of GLR.

    The third one solves the well known C++ ambiguity between certain declarations and statements.

    To compile them, install Parse::Eyapp and follow the perldoc instructions in the grammars.

    I still believe it is important for the Perl community to cover some important parsing algorithms. There is no currently in CPAN an implementation of GLR, which is important not only when writing translators for DSLs but also in Natural Language Processing

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Re^2: Yacc is dead
by casiano (Pilgrim) on Dec 08, 2010 at 23:27 UTC
    Write a paper. Publish it. Write some more. Get people behind whatever views you have. *THEN* come back to organize an army.

    We have already written a paper. An there are three more on the subject waiting for the reviews. Hope they will be accepted.

    But no army yet :-). Just another person.

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