Link: Parsing: a timeline

April 17, 2018

Jeffery Kegler's Parsing: a timeline (via) is what it says on the title; it's an (opinionated) timeline of various developments in computer language parsing. There are a number of fascinating parts to it and many bits of history that I hadn't known and I'm glad to have read about. Among other things, this timeline discusses all of the things that aren't actually really solved problems in parsing, which is informative all by itself.

(I've been exposed to various aspects of parsing and it's a long standing interest of mine, but I don't think I've ever seen the history of the field laid out like this. I had no idea that so many things were relatively late developments, or of all of the twists and turns involved in the path to LALR parsers.)


Comments on this page:

By Mike G at 2018-04-17 11:50:49:

Pretty cool writeup... It should give at least a passing mention to one-pass compilers, though, since Turbo Pascal beat all the other compilers around in its heyday by a large margin.

By cks at 2018-04-17 19:16:53:

All of the common parsing algorithms (including recursive descent parsers) are single-pass parsers that examine each token only once. The one-pass or multi-pass nature of a compiler comes in later, with what it does with the results of the parsing.

(Classical lexing also has the goal of examining each character only once as it turns them into tokens.)

Written on 17 April 2018.
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Last modified: Tue Apr 17 00:48:04 2018
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