Re: C++ parsing : what's new ?

> As I recall the motivation is performance. The people doing the
> rewrite expect the recursive descent parser to be way faster than
> the table-driven one they have now.


Just to clarify, the main comparison here is between top-down and
bottom-up parsing. Top-down is somewhat faster because more of the
runtime work is encoded in the grammar. The trade off is its weaker
recognition ability.


From Fischer & LeBlanc "Crafting a Compiler with C", page 120:


"Since the LL(1) driver uses a stack rather than recursive procedure
calls to store symbols yet to be matched, the resulting parser can be
expected to be smaller and faster than a corresponding recursive
descent parser."

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