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POLearning More About Parsing
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copied!<p>I have been programming since 1999 for work and fun. I want to learn new things, and lately I've been focused on parsing, as a large part of my job is reading, integrating and analyzing data. I also have a large number of repetitive tasks that I think I could express in very simple domain-specific languages if the overhead was low enough. I have a few questions about the subject. </p> <ol> <li>Most of my current parsing code don't define a formal grammar. I usually hack something together in my language of choice because that's easy, I know how to do it and I can write that code very fast. It's also easy for other people I work with to maintain. What are the advantages and disadvantages of defining a grammar and generating a real parser (as one would do with <a href="http://www.antlr.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ANTLR</a> or <a href="http://dinosaur.compilertools.net/yacc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">YACC</a>) to parse things compared with the hacks that most programmers used to write parsers? </li> <li>What are the best parser generation tools for writing grammar-based parsers in C++, Perl and Ruby? I've looked at <a href="http://www.antlr.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ANTLR</a> and haven't found much about using ANTLRv3 with a C++ target, but otherwise that looks interesting. What are the other tools that are similar to ANTLR that I should be reading about?</li> <li>What are the canonical books and articles that someone interested in learning more about parsing? A course in compilers unfortunately wasn't part of my education, so basic material is very welcome. I've heard great things about the <a href="http://dragonbook.stanford.edu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Dragon Book</a>, but what else is out there? </li> </ol>

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