Perl and Parsing 5: Rewind
The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Left
On 28 February 2006, the Golden Age of Right Parsing ended. The End of the Age was like a rewind of the Beginning. The Golden Age of Right Parsing began when a right parser replaced the hand-written recursive descent parser in the C compiler. It ended, almost three decades later, when the world's most visible C compiler replaced its right parser with a hand-written recursive descent implementation.
Right parsing was taken out of mathematical notation on the pages of academic journals and put on the map in 1978. That's when Steven Johnson …
I blog about Perl, with a focus on parsing and Marpa, my parsing algorithm based on Jay Earley's.