Why Strings as Classes?

[Benji Smith]

superdan wrote:
> Benji Smith Wrote:
>>
>> I wrote a streaming CSV parser (which takes discipline to do correctly, 
>> since a double-quote enclosed field can legally contain arbitrary 
>> newline characters, and quotes are escaped by doubling). It provides a 
>> field callback and a record callback, so it's very handy for performing 
>> ETL tasks.
>>
>> If I had to load the whole CSV files into memory before parsing, it 
>> wouldn't work, because sometimes they can be hundreds of megabytes. But 
>> the streaming parser takes up almost no memory at all.
>>
>> --benji
> 
> sure it takes very little memory. i'll tell u how much memory u need in fact. it's the finite state needed by the fsa. u could do that because csv only needs finite state for parsing. soon as you need to backtrack stream parsing becomes very difficult.

Noooooooobody uses backtracking to parse.

Most of the time LL(k) token lookahead solves the problem. Sometimes you 
need a syntactic predicate or (rarely) a semantic predicate.

I've never even heard of a parser generator framework that supported 
backtracking.

--benji