34.5 Dominus 2005

Although my approach to parsing is not influenced by Mark Jason Dominus’s Higher Order Perl, Mark’s treatment of parsing is an excellent introduction to parsing, especially in a Perl context. His focus on just about every other technique except general BNF parsing is pretty much standard, and will help a beginner understand how unconventional Marpa’s approach is.

Both Mark’s Perl and his English are examples of good writing, and the book is dense with insights. Mark’s discussion on memoization in Chapter 3 is the best I’ve seen. I wish I’d bought his book earlier in my coding.

Mark’s book is available on-line. You can download chapter-by-chapter or the whole thing at once, and you can take your pick of his original sources or PDF, at http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/. A PDF of the parsing chapter is at http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/pdf/08Parsing.pdf.