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by maxbond
320 days ago
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I'm not saying everyone or even anyone in particular needs a parser generator. I'm saying real, widely deployed projects - as far as you can get from academic - empirically find it useful. Creating abstractions does decrease complexity if one (or more) of the following is true: - The abstraction generates savings in excess of it's own complexity - The abstraction is shared by enough projects to amortize the cost of writing/maintaining it to a tolerable level - There are additional benefits like validating your grammars are unambiguous or generating flow charts of your syntax in your documentation, amortizing the cost across different features of the same project It's up to you as the implementer to weigh the benefits and costs. If you choose to use recursive descent, more power to you. (For what it's worth, I personally use parser combinators to split the difference between writing grammars and hand-rolling parsers. But I've used parser generators before and found them helpful.) |
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If your goal is simply to reduce bugs--not something more complex like generating parsers in a bunch of languages--then hand rolling a parser generator and then using it to generate your parser [singular] is not a path to achieving your goals. That's what I said, and that's actually just true, which you probably know.
This is not an invitation to bring up irrelevant, exceptional cases, it's the rule of thumb you should operate on. Put another way, don't add layers when there isn't a reason to do so. If there is a reason to do so, have at it. Obviously.
In a meta sense, it's pretty socially inept to jump in with corrections like this. In a complex field like programming, of course there are exceptions, and it's disrespectful to the group of professionals in the room to assume that they don't know about the exceptions. I'm guilty of this myself: it's because I was brought up being praised for knowing things, so I want to demonstrate that I know things. But as an adult, I had to learn that I'm not the only knowledgeable person in the room, and it's rude to assume that I am.