Let's stop parser Hell

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/7/12 7:33 AM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 07-Jul-12 15:30, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
>> On Saturday, 7 July 2012 at 10:26:39 UTC, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
>>> I think that Pegged can be heavily optimized in performance, and there
>>> are no
>>> fundamental issues which would make it inherently slower than LALR or
>>> a hand-written D-specific parser.
>>
>> Hmm... found an interesting article:
>> http://www.antlr.org/papers/LL-star-PLDI11.pdf
>>
>> It describes some disadvantages of Packrat parsing, like problems with
>> debugging and error recovery. These are important for DCT, so I'll have
>> to perform additional research.
>
> Yup, LL(*) is my favorite so far.

That's Terence Parr's discovery, right? I've always liked ANTLR, so if 
PEGs turn out to have issues LL(*) sounds like a promising alternative.

How many semantics hacks does D's syntax need for a LL(*) parser?


Andrei