On 15-Sep-2000, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Doug Ransom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
>
> > Are combinator parsers recursive decent? Do they have any disadvantages
> > over generated parsers like that yacc would produce?
>
> Yes, they are recursive decent. As a consequence you have
> to left-factorise left-recursive productions in the grammar;
> otherwise, the parser won't terminate. Other than that,
> there are two disadvantages that I see: Speed and clarity of
> error messages during *development* of the parser.
>
> As for speed, Doitase Swierstra et al. came up with a very
> clever scheme of computing a parse table in a combinator
> parser on-the-fly during parsing, which makes things a lot
> faster:
Doesn't that technique also solve the problem of left-recursion?
--
Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
