From: Alberto Lavelli
Subject: META parsing of Context-Free-Grammars
Date: 
Message-ID: <5ckf8k$kc5@wonder.itc.it>
I have just finished reading 'Pragmatic Parsing in Common Lisp'
("ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/Prag-Parse.ps.Z") by Henry Baker and I
have found it very interesting.

I have immediately used the META parsing approach for re-implementing a 
tokenizer (much more efficiently both in space and time than my previous 
implementation); in such case I have used the META parsing of regular 
grammars, which is fully explained in the paper.

I am curious to know if anybody else found the approach proposed by Henry
Baker so effective or the efficiency improvement I experienced is due only
to my poor knowledge of Lisp.

I am also wondering if anyone else has used the META parsing approach for 
Context-Free Grammars, which is only sketched in the paper and at first 
sight seems to be a little bit less straightforward to adopt. 


best

	alberto lavelli
From: Emergent Technologies Inc.
Subject: Re: META parsing of Context-Free-Grammars
Date: 
Message-ID: <01bc0f7d$337d2760$27fc6bcc@default>
I played with it.  It is very nice, and the improvement you see is not just
an artifact of Lisp.

It is a bit tricky to do context-free grammers because the META parser
can't back up.

Alberto Lavelli <·······@irst.it> wrote in article
<··········@wonder.itc.it>...
> 
> I have just finished reading 'Pragmatic Parsing in Common Lisp'
> ("ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/Prag-Parse.ps.Z") by Henry Baker and
I
> have found it very interesting.
> 

> 	alberto lavelli
>