publicly and privately I hear from folks who tell me that Marpa is an OO superclass waiting to happen. I can see their point. If there ever was a case for code reuse, the Marpa algorithm is one. On the other hand, any non-trivial use of Marpa requires additional semantics, so that the Marpa classes walk, swim and quack very much like abstract type classes.

Furthermore, the additional semantics that Marpa needs comes in pieces -- semantic actions. And even though these piec…

is a general context-free parser. What does that mean? For a grammar writer, it means that he doesn't need to worry that the next rule he adds to the grammar is the one that makes it hit the invisible wall that most other parser generators set up. If you can write it in BNF, Marpa will parse it. Which makes Marpa::XS good at incremental development.

As you develop your Marpa grammar, you can track the tradeoffs you are making between features and efficiency. Chances are,…

Marpa::XS does not come with a lexer, I'd respond that, in a very real sense it does -- Perl. Perl5 is a powerful lexical analyzer.

If you're trying to figure out how to write your first Marpa parser, I'd recommend a close look at Wolfgang Kinkeldei's recent posting about his Marpa-powered CSS parser. Wolfgang lays his parser out in a very elegant fashion, and I find his code makes an excellent templat…