C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 07:35:02 -0400 (CLT)

I was going to post this comment at
http://blog.zenspider.com/2008/10/im-in-lexer-hell.html but had problems
with posting.


Not sure it would improve things, but it might be simpler if you left
things with an ambiguous grammar, then tried some variant of packrat
parsing.  If the parsing was lazy (to avoid exploring all the different
options) you could then have a second pass that goes through and selects
the right parse (using context to resolve ambiguities).

Not sure that makes sense (I've never done anything like that myself), but
it might result in cleaner code.  In python you might be able to implement
the packrat parsing using generators - don't know if that carries across
to ruby...


It doesn't seem like that crazy idea, but I don't know of anyone doing it.

Andrew