News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Parsing: a timeline by lucio on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @02:33PM (#16861032)
Are you saying that the user "can not" determine? Who's the user? the source code writer?
Re:Parsing: a timeline by jeffreykegler on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @04:13PM (#16861891)
The author of the PEG script cannot in general know what language it actually describes -- it's just too hard. For more, see https://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/indi.... It has references, which you can follow up on.

You're safe if the grammar is LL(1) -- what you sees is what you get. After that it gets mysterious fast.

Re:Parsing: a timeline by lucio on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @06:30PM (#16862866)
The language definition is pre-existent to the PEG parser you can write for it. PEG has a lot of advantages as a tool, and its a nice experience to write by hand. You do not author a PEG script, you author a language definition first. You're saying that if the lang definition is lost, then is hard to recover it from the PEG script or the parser code. Yes, but it is not a normal situation.