Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Why Bison is Becoming Extinct

With computers getting faster, there’s less reason to put up with LALR(1) parser generators like Bison and Yacc. John Aycock sees a shift to more powerful Earley and GLR parsers that don’t require fiddling with the grammar to reduce conflicts and left-recursion. Earley, which “just worked” when I used it about five years ago, is cubic in the worst case but has good performance for most “normal” grammars.

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Karl Dubost pointed me to Yacker, a little Web app that generates parsers in different languages.

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