Link Details

Though I'd rather avoid it, string parsing is a crucial part of programming. Since we're more than 60 years into the use of modern computers, it seems like we should have a pretty good handle on how to build abstractions over parsing. Indeed, there are tons of great tools out there, like GNU Yacc, Haskell's Parsec, newer Packrat-based parsers like Factor's EBNF syntax for PEGs, and a bunch of other high level parsing libraries. These libraries are relatively easy to use once you understand the underlying structure (each one parses a different subset of context-free grammars), because they expose the programmer to a tree-like view of the string.