HackerTube

Parsing with Derivatives

Stanford1 HN recommenders · 2016–2023
13K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2011-06-03

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.

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisFunctional programming

Watch on YouTube

3 comments from Hacker News

@joe_the_user2016 · in “On the Complexity and Performance of Parsing with Derivatives”

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] [VIDEO]

CitesView on HN
@cellularmitosis2018 · in “A Battle Plan for a War on Rare Diseases: Conversation with Matt Might”

Off topic, but he also gave a great talk on parsing with derivatives [VIDEO] which was used by the clojure team [LINK]

RecommendsView on HN
@ThatGeoGuy2023 · in “Why Split Lexing and Parsing into Two Separate Phases?”

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]: [VIDEO]

CitesView on HN