First of all, hi everyone, I'm new to this list. I'm a grad student who's worked on and off with Python on various projects for 8ish years now. I recently wanted to construct a parser for another programing language in Python and was dissapointed that Python doesn't have a built-in module for building parsers, which seems like a common-enough task. There are plenty of different 3rd-party parsing libraries available, specialized in lots of different ways (see e.g., [1]). I happened to pick one that seemed suitable for my needs but didn't turn out to support the recursive structures that I needed to parse. Rather than pick a different one I just built my own parser generator module, and used that to build my parser: problem solved.
It would have been much nicer if there were a fully-featured builtin parser generator module in Python, however, and the purpose of this email is to test the waters a bit: is this something that other people in the Python community would be interested in? I imagine the route to providing a built-in parser generator module would be to first canvass the community to figure out what third-party libraries they use, and then contact the developers of some of the top libraries to see if they'd be happy integrating as a built-in module. At that point someone would need to work to integrate the chosen third-party library as a built-in module (ideally with its developers). >From what I've looked at PyParsing and PLY seem to be standout parser generators for Python, PyParsing has a bit more Pythonic syntax from what I've seen. One important issue would be speed though: an implementation mostly written in C for low-level parsing tasks would probably be much preferrable to one written in pure Python, since a builtin module should be geared towards efficiency, but I don't actually know exactly how that would work (I've both extended and embedded Python with/in C before, but I'm not sure how that kind of project relates to writing a built-in module in C). Sorry if this is a bit rambly, but I'm interested in feedback from the community on this idea: is a builtin parser generator module desirable? If so, would integrating PyParsing as a builtin module be a good solution? What 3rd-party parsing module do you think would serve best for this purpose? -Peter Mawhorter [1] http://nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
