A general BNF parser is one which fulfills the same expectation for BNF. Write your language in BNF, you got a parser. But it hasn't been that simple.

The guys who write the textbooks have pushed general BNF parsing for years. Improvements in these algorithms have pushed the speeds down to linear or close to it for the kinds of language in practical use.

But the general parsing algorithms have languished on the textbook pages. And I did find it…

I'm contemplating breaking a very well-established standard: Version arguments to Perl's "use" statement. The module writer is free to change the semantics of these, but despite the endless eccentricities you find on CPAN in other things, they rarely (never?) do.

So I'm having guilt feelings. Insecurities are coming out. I'm getting second thoughts. In this post I will handle these things the way many people do. Preach.

Consider a default module use like

    use Marpa;

The standard (and almost universal) sema…

I'd like to add my praise to the heap of it already piled onto NYTProf. This is a Perl profiler available on CPAN, with a very attractive HTML interface.

If you wait for your next efficiency issue before using NYTProf, you're making a mistake. For me optimizing is no longer NYTProf's primary purpose. NYTProf is a powerful debugging tool. The count of the number of times each line was executed yields marvelous insights quickly. Consider an example: a script to process a file. It is acting strangely. You don't know where to …