Stanford
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2023
1:13:10 · 13K views · Jun 3, 2011
A Stanford talk by Matthew Might on parsing with derivatives, a new way to write parsers, and why better parsing tools are needed. It discusses language theory and criticizes ad-hoc hand-written parsers.
Mentioned as a great talk and related reading in threads on parsing techniques.
3 comments from Hacker News
Off topic, but he also gave a great talk on parsing with derivatives this video which was used by the clojure team [LINK]
Yes, I'm scanning the original video introducing derivatives[1]. The need for parsing is ubiquitous yet, Never mind CS students, in my experiences a significant number of professional programmers cannot create a basic parser either from scratch or from a standard tool. Edit: The video picks on hand-written c parser. Such a thing isn't necessarily bad IF it's in a formally derived recursive descent parser. But just ad-hoc parsing without being informed by a grammar is pretty much waiting for disaster. [1] this video
In addition to this, I always think about Matt Might's "Parsing with Derivatives." [1] I'll have to read about flap, as it seems to utilize a lexer based on derivatives. [1]: this video