On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Sam Roberts wrote:

> Hi Hugh.
>
> Two suggestions:
>
> Most of the docs for parser-generators assume some (lots?) knowledge of
> compiler theory. An exception is the O'Reilly Lex&Yacc book. If any of
         [...]
Thanks, I'll see if I can get my hands on this.  I've read a few books
about these but that description sounds good.
>
> I think that if you do this often, mastering one of these tools will be
> a life skill you'll never regret! And yacc (or one of the others) is a
> mini-language in its own right, always good to learn another.

Agreed, I'd really like to be fluent in it.

>
> On another track, I have deliberately NOT used these grammers when
> parseing the BNF for internet email. In my experience, if you can write
> the grammer down in BNF, its usually pretty easy to write a recursive
> descent parser for it. It's a little tedious though, which is why all
> the tools exist to generate the code for you...

According to "Crafting a Compiler" ISBN 0-8053-3201-4 it seems that
recursive descent implies LL(1), so I think I'd agree with aiming
for that constraint.  It describes tecniques for removing the
ambiguity that increases LL(1) to LL(k), so often this is doable.
>
> Have fun,
> Sam
>
         Thank you,
         Hugh
>
>