Quotes About Parsing

I would send out some contests. "Here's some code. Here's the benchmark. Make it fast." I sent our load balancer's header parsing. We were all writing crazy regexps that didn't backtrack and tried to capture things with the most efficient capture groups. And we were all competing, getting faster and faster and faster. Then one guy comes over the next day. He had written it all in C++ with XS, and so he was like, "I win.

Beware of situations where there is no alternative to parsing text messages! If the information isn't available in other ways, people will parse any textual output generated by your code.

Everyone else is parsing it in terms of lowering the corporate income tax. Eliminate it. It's not that big of a generator of income, and it's a double tax. Get rid of it, and you would have an explosion of hiring.

Use # as an introducer for comments. It is good to have a way to embed annotations and comments in data files. It's best if they're actually part of the file structure, and so will be preserved by tools that know its format. For comments that are not preserved during parsing, # is the conventional start character.

Gone out to look for a hair to split, I expect.

Simplicity only makes sense in context. If I'm writing a parser with a team that understands parser generators, then using a parser generator is simple. If the team doesn't know anything about parsing and the language is simple, a recursive descent parser is simpler.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.

At that word, Fates, her eyes flashed. She was a goddess of argument, born from the bright, relentless mind of Zeus. If she was forbidden something, even by the three gray goddesses themselves, she would not simply submit. She would set about parsing the constraint down to its atoms, and try to eke a way through.