Yacc is dead

Matthew Might; David Darais

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arXiv · 1010.5023

Yacc is dead

Matthew Might·David Darais

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Abstract

We present two novel approaches to parsing context-free languages. The first approach is based on an extension of Brzozowski's derivative from regular expressions to context-free grammars. The second approach is based on a generalization of the derivative to parser combinators. The payoff of these techniques is a small (less than 250 lines of code), easy-to-implement parsing library capable of parsing arbitrary context-free grammars into lazy parse forests. Implementations for both Scala and Haskell are provided. Preliminary experiments with S-Expressions parsed millions of tokens per second, which suggests this technique is efficient enough for use in practice.

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Matthew Might, David Darais. 2010-10-24. Yacc is dead. https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5023

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