Re: Transparent recursive descent

Posted for patl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com
Thu, 4 Nov 1993 02:57:13 GMT

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Transparent recursive descent doug@netcom.com (1993-11-01)
Re: Transparent recursive descent norman@flaubert.bellcore.com (1993-11-02)
Re: Transparent recursive descent Postedforpatl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com (1993-11-04)
More references on META parsers jimc@tekcae.cax.tek.com (1993-11-04)
Re: Transparent recursive descent doug@netcom.com (1993-11-16)
| List of all articles for this month |
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: Posted for patl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com
Keywords: parse
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR.
References: 93-11-012 93-11-017
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1993 02:57:13 GMT

norman@flaubert.bellcore.com (Norman Ramsey) writes:
>>In past years I've been disgruntled that the classic approach to recursive
>>descent parsing of arithmetic expressions is inherently complex, long, and
>>unintuitive compared with the conceptual simplicity of expressions.


What about the META parser technique? A couple of papers were published in
1964 with the words "META II" and "META 3" in the titles. Can't remember
the authors.


These came to my attention in 1991, when Henry G. Baker published an
implementation of META in Common Lisp in "Lisp Pointers". I think it was
the April-June 1991 issue.


Henry's implementation is simple and clean. (About 20 or so lines of code,
as I remember.) It defined a simple syntax shorthand for sequences of
patterns, alternatives, etc.


Neat stuff.
--
patl@goldfish.mitron.tek.com
--

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