[Cross-posted by invitation from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog.]
1960: The ALGOL 60 spec comes out. It specifies, for the first time, a block structured language. The ALGOL committee is well aware that nobody knows how to parse such a language. But they believe that, if they specify a block-structured language, a parser for it will be invented. Risky as this approach is, it pays off ...
[ Cross-posted by invitation from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]
Marpa has a new official public website, which Ron Savage has generously agreed to manage. For those who have not heard of it, Marpa is a parsing algorithm. It is new, but very much based on earlier work by Jay Earley, Joop Leo, John Aycock and R. Nigel Horspool. Marpa is intended to replace, and to go well beyond, recursive descent and the yacc family of parsers.
I blog about Perl, with a focus on parsing and Marpa, my parsing algorithm based on Jay Earley's.
