Re:We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques
by morelisp on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @02:30PM
(#34417425)
> but the number of students who will ever write a compiler (even for a small DSL, let alone a real language is minimal).
IMO this confuses cause and effect. People write few compilers (speaking very widely here of any “parse-process-emit” program) because they don’t know how, not because they’re not facing problems where a compiler would help.
I’m not sure teaching LR parsers is a good solution to this, but I do know if you’ve wrestled even a trivial LR language, even via parser generator, you’ll never fear recursive descent.
IMO this confuses cause and effect. People write few compilers (speaking very widely here of any “parse-process-emit” program) because they don’t know how, not because they’re not facing problems where a compiler would help.
I’m not sure teaching LR parsers is a good solution to this, but I do know if you’ve wrestled even a trivial LR language, even via parser generator, you’ll never fear recursive descent.