Marpa Following a standard rhetoric of version numbers, this indicates that it's an official release and a major step forward, but still alpha. Marpa is a general BNF parser generator -- it parses from any grammar that you can write in BNF. It's based on Earley's algorithm, but incorporates recent advances, so that it runs in linear time for all those grammars parseable by yacc or recursive descent.

The big news with Marpa 0.200000 is Marpa's 3rd generation evaluator. The previous version of Marpa had two eval…

This series of blog posts on "Perl and Parsing", which is evolving into a mini-history of parsing theory, started as an offshoot of my own attempt at a contribution to parsing. I wanted to do a couple of blog posts aimed at those trying to decide whether it was better to take a chance with my new parser (Marpa), or to stick with the terrors of the known. There's a large literature on parsing, but mu…