I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kegler’s blog on the Marpa parsing algorithm for a couple of years now.

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kegler’s blog on the Marpa parsing algorithm for a couple of years now. Jeffrey does a great job at making the topic accessible to readers who don’t have a background in parser theory.

As I understand it, Marpa is the first implementation of some profound discoveries in the field of efficient grammars. It looks like it can beat YACC in just about every way: it’s faster, it can handle more complicated grammars, and it provides better context for writing useful syntax error messages.

I highly recommend Jeffrey’s blog if you’re interested in computer languages. It’s hosted at blogs.perl.org, but you don’t need to have a background in Perl — only about 25% of his posts assume Perl knowledge.

http://blogs.perl.org/users/jeffrey_kegler/2011/11/what-is-the-marpa-algorithm.html