Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide

http://www.few.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html

by fogus • 15 years ago

86 12 15 years ago

few.vu.nl

barrkel2• 15 years ago

There is a certain degree of contradiction between "a practical guide" and a book that purports to cover "(almost) all parsing methods, not just the popular ones".

As a matter of practicality, you could probably get away with just (a) finite automata, both in the hand-coded lexer style and regular expression style tools like lex; (b) LL(k), both in hand-coded recursive descent and tools like antlr; and (c) GLR, when you need to pull out bigger guns.

jpitz• 15 years ago

According to TFA, "No advanced mathematical knowledge is required; the book is based on an intuitive and engineering-like understanding of the processes involved in parsing, rather than on the set manipulations used in practice." I'm guessing this drives the "practical" moniker.

A little googling uncovers a Second Edition, also available on pdf.

_tef5• 15 years ago

The second edition is far superior to the first in terms of coverage and depth.

edit: I read a draft copy and after getting sucked into it for a weekend I grabbed the hard copy.

barrkel2• 15 years ago

The thing is, the mathematics behind parsing, such as they are, are not complicated. The concepts of first and follow sets, if not their names, are required to see how grammars can be ambiguous for a simple LL or LALR parser. Set notation for formal definitions of state machines may be slightly daunting, but the intuitions are easily grasped from a few diagrams.

I'm probably too close to this domain to have a useful perspective for those not familiar with it though.

_tef5• 15 years ago

If you want that sort of succinctness, it is already covered in many compiler text books.

This is to complement the existing literature with a broad and deep coverage of parsing in specific. There is most to parsing than just the front end of a compiler :-)

haberman3• 15 years ago

It's practical in the sense that it contains the information required to actually implement the different parsing methods instead of just getting lost in the theory. I don't think it's a contradiction at all.

warrenwilkinson• 15 years ago

It's to bad they didn't put the table of contents online as HTML. I could download the postscript but I'm bouncing instead (boiing!)

haberman3• 15 years ago

Love this book! It's the encyclopedia of parsing: it contains enough information to get a basic understanding of almost any parsing topic, but contains an awesome 417-entry annotated bibliography for references to primary sources.

See my Amazon.com review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R17E19PSPM2UO9/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...

_tef5• 15 years ago

There is an extended bibliography online for the second edition you've linked

ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG_2nd_Edition/index.html

''' The printed book contains only the about 400 literature references that are referred to in the book itself, all of them with annotations. The complete list of literature references comprises about 1700 entries of which around 1100 are annotated. It can be found here. It consists of augmented versions of the Table of Contents, Chapter 18, the Authors' Index, and the Subject Index, each reflecting in its way the added entries. '''

_tef5• 15 years ago

I would also like to say that the second edition is one of the finest cs-books I have.

Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide

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