Let's stop parser Hell

[Roman D. Boiko]

On Saturday, 7 July 2012 at 16:56:06 UTC, Chad J wrote:
> Yeah, it's good to hear this notion reinforced.  I had this 
> suspicion that the packrat parser is not necessarily the 
> best/fastest solution, mostly because of the large allocation 
> that has to happen before you get O(n) performance.  Thus I 
> figured that pegged might eventually use different parsing 
> strategies underneath it all, possibly with a lot of 
> special-casing and clever hand-tuned and profiled 
> optimizations.  At least that's what makes sense to me.

At the very least, we could use DFA instead of backtracking where 
possible. This is the approach implemented in ANTLR, but I wanted 
to introduce them before I knew about existence of the latter, 
simply because this would likely produce the fastest parsers 
possible.