March 2013 Archives

What if languages were free?

[ This is cross-posted from the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

an article titled "What if Mass Storage were Free?". Costs of mass storage were showing signs that they might fall dramatically. Copeland, as a thought exercise, took this trend to its extreme. Among other things, he predicted that deletion would become unnecessary, and in fact, undesirable…

The Interpreter Design Pattern

The influential Design Patterns book lays out 23 patterns for programming. One of them, the Interpreter Pattern, is rarely used. Steve Yegge puts it a bit more strikingly -- he says that the book contains 22 patter…

BNF to AST

[ This is cross-posted from the new home of the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

The latest version of Marpa takes parsing "whipitupitude" one step further. You can now go straight from a BNF description of your language, and an input string, to an abstract syntax tree (AST).

To illu…

About Jeffrey Kegler

user-pic I blog about Perl, with a focus on parsing and Marpa, my parsing algorithm based on Jay Earley's.