Parsing
Parsing is the process of creating a data structure from textual input. Parsing is the first step done by programming language compilers, but is also necessary whenever we want to use any data format.
Posts
An Overview Of The Marpa Parser
There are many exciting parser technologies out there, and one of the most promising is Marpa. This post discusses how Marpa improves over commonly used parsers.
m//gc Style Lexing With Perl
or: Five Parsing Techniques You Can't Do With s/// Substitutions
You are writing a simple lexer or parser in Perl? You'll probably use regexes. Here's how to use the little-known pos() function to correctly apply regexes.
Transforming Syntax
Or: how to write the easy part of a compiler
A Stack Overflow question asked how to translate a VB-like conditional into a C-like ternary. The other answers suggested regexes or treating it as Perl code *shudder*. But transpiling code to another language can be done correctly.
This post aims to cover:
- parsing with Marpa::R2,
- AST manipulation,
- optimization passes,
- compilation, and
- Perl OO.
In the end, we'll be able to do all that in only 200 lines of code!
Since this post is already rather long, we will not discuss parsing theory. You are expected to be familiar with EBNF grammar notation.
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