LaunchBar 4.1 is now Universal and starts up much faster. Other improvements include a Calculate script that lets you quickly type a mathematical expression and have it evaluated (using Perl)—no more opening Calculator just to do simple calculations.
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.
