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Parser, Lexer, Smoke, and Mirrors

From:
Chip Salzenberg
Date:
July 24, 2000 16:25
Subject:
Parser, Lexer, Smoke, and Mirrors
Message ID:
20000724134551.C650@perlsupport.com
According to Simon Cozens:
> Having a combined lexer-parser may freak out you computer scientists,
> but for us computational linguists, it's standard NLP practise.

I think it's reasonable to try to reduce the coupling, both as a goal
and as one metric of language complexity.  But I agree that trying to
eliminate the coupling is probably futile.

In accord with Laziness, it's worth considering a change from the
lexer+BNF parser strategy to something with less of an impedance
mismatch with Perl's nature.  Antlr, say, or PCCTS.  Or even a hand-
written recursive descent parser.  We could use Parse::RecDescent to
prototype it....
-- 
Chip Salzenberg              - a.k.a. -              <chip@valinux.com>
"I wanted to play hopscotch with the impenetrable mystery of existence,
    but he stepped in a wormhole and had to go in early."  // MST3K



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