(also replying to siblings)

Parsley is just so good a name. It has the word parse as a kangaroo, and it evokes the image of fresh, green, edible.

I just ran

    grep /usr/share/dict/words -e "^pars[^']*[^s]$"

to find the following list of words beginning with pars

    parse
    parsec
    parsed
    parser
    parsimony
    parsing
    parsley
    parsnip
    parson
    parsonage

I think I might call my next parsing-oriented tool either parson or parsnip. :)

I was interested in "kangaroo"; Wikipedia suggests a kangaroo word should, in addition to having the same letters and in the same order as its parent, also have the same meaning (eg. masculine -> male), so "parse" isn't quite a kangaroo for "parsley", apparently. It'd be a moderately fun little challenge to write a little program to find some kangaroos - though Wiktionary (predictably) has a nice list already here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Kangaroo_words

"Parsley" is indeed a great name. I'll contribute another Parsley - a Flex framework of yore also bore that name.

The reason I thought it was a kangaroo was specifically because it was being used as a name for a parsing library.

After a library is named "Parsley", the list of meanings for Parsley now includes "A parsing library", and so I see it as a kangaroo for Parse.

> grep /usr/share/dict/words -e "^pars[^']<star>[^s]$"

(I changed a literal asterisk to <star> to avoid formatting.) You get a few more options if you remove the anchor at the beginning:

    grep /usr/share/dict/words -e "pars[^']<star>[^s]$"

For example, 'sparse' seems like a good name for a lightweight parser library.

I'm afraid there's https://github.com/darius/parson already too. (I went through the same process to name it -- there's not much left in that well, is there?)

Oops, looks like I was beaten by cgrand himself. https://github.com/cgrand/parsnip

Or http://parsleyjs.org/

Or Parsley: a pattern-matching language based on OMeta and Python

https://github.com/python-parsley/parsley

Or a PEG grammar parser written in python:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Parsley

First commit on fizx/parsley was in 2008. The library was open-sourced in 2009. This predates all of the name conflicts so far mentioned, though no doubt someone used the name before in some capacity.