35 Acknowledgements

Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you; and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a halfpenny.

This section is to thank those who have assisted us, not just with Libmarpa, but with the Marpa project as a whole. Many people have helped us in many ways, and it is risky to single out one of them. But Ron Savage was a very aggressive early adopter of Marpa, went on to maintain a Marpa web site and FAQ, and provided generous financial support.

Two other very early supporters were Peter Stuifzand and Ruslan Zakirov. Peter Stuifzand invented the “Stuifzand interface”, the prototype on which Marpa’s SLIF interface is based. Ruslan Zakirov started, and agreed to moderate, the “Marpa parser” mailing list. A list of the other contributions to Marpa that Ron, Peter, and Ruslan Z. made over the years would be very long.

Larry Wall provided wise and experienced advice which saved us much trouble. Larry’s openness to new ideas has been a major encouragement, and his insight into the relationship between “natural language” and computer language has been a major influence. Randal Schwartz, Allison Randal and Patrick Michaud were also generous with their very valuable time.

At perlmonks.org, answers from chromatic, Corion, dragonchild, jdporter, samtregar and Juerd were helpful. In writing an early, “pure Perl” version of Marpa, I benefited from studying the work of Francois Desarmenien (Parse::Yapp), Damian Conway (Parse::RecDescent) and Graham Barr (Scalar::Util). Adam Kennedy patiently instructed me in module writing, both on the finer points and on issues about which I really should have known better.

Jean-Damien Durand’s assistance included several ambitious Marpa applications, as well as the Windows port of Marpa. Deyan Ginev provided advice on LaTeX and on deeper matters which proved essential. Lenz Moritz quietly and effectively maintained our IRC channel. Andrew Rodland stood in for Jeffrey Kegler as the face of Marpa when it was needed, and his TAP parser, which used one Marpa grammar that fed another, was a major inspiration for the SLIF. Ruslan Shvedov provided many hours of assistance, including contributing linguistic insights into details of code testing, creating a test suite for Libmarpa, making major contributions to the Perl test suite, helping with my implementation of ASF’s, and assisting me in writing documentation. Luc St-Louis moderated the Marpa IRC channel, saving Jeffrey time, and the channel’s other users from having to put up with Jeffrey who, as a moderator, could be too heavy-handed. An anonymous member of the Hoon community was generous financially.

Additional help came from Dave Abrahams, Mohammad S Anwar, Lukas Atkinson, Peter Blackson, Domingo Alvarez Duarte, Anton Dyudin, B. Fraser, Zaki Mughal, Omar Roth, Arsen Shnurkov, Aria Stewart, Flaviu Tomas, and David Whitten.

Finally, my thanks to all those who participated in the discussions on perlmonk.org, on the “Marpa parser” mailing list, and on the #marpa IRC channel. It is hard to describe how important informed and constructive feedback is to a lone laborer on a complex and large project like Marpa, and I greatly appreciate all those who participated.