NAME¶
Marpa::R2::Advanced::Bibliography - A Marpa bibliography
History of the Marpa algorithm¶
- 1970
- Jay Earley invents the algorithm that now bears his name.
- 1991
- Joop Leo describes a way to modify Earley's algorithm so that it runs in
O(n) time for all LR-regular grammars. LR-regular is a vast class of
grammars, including all the LR(k) grammars, all grammars parseable with
recursive descent, and regular expressions. LR-regular can safely be
thought of as including all grammars in practical use today, and then
some.
- 2002
- Aycock and Horspool describe a way to do LR(0) precomputation for
Earley's algorithm. Their method makes Earley's faster in most practical
situations, but not all. In particular, right-recursion remains quadratic
in the Aycock and Horspool algorithm. Worst case is no better than
Earley's. Leo is unaware of Aycock and Horspool's work and Aycock and
Horspool seem unaware of Leo.
- 2010
- Marpa combines the Leo and Aycock-Horspool algorithms, in the process
making significant changes to both of them. The result preserves the best
features of both. Marpa also tackles the many remaining implementation
issues.
Bibliography¶
Aho and Ullman 1972¶
The Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, Volume I: Parsing by
Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman (Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey,
1972). I think this was the standard source for Earley's algorithm for
decades. It certainly was
my standard source. The account of Earley's
algorithm is on pages 320-330.
Aycock and Horspool 2002¶
Marpa is based on ideas from John Aycock and R. Nigel Horspool's "Practical
Earley Parsing",
The Computer Journal, Vol. 45, No. 6, 2002, pp.
620-630. The idea of doing
LR(0) precomputation for Earley's general
parsing algorithm, and Marpa's approach to handling nullable symbols and
rules, both came from this article.
The Aycock and Horspool paper summarizes Earley's very nicely and is available
on the web:
<
http://www.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/Publications/PracticalEarleyParsing.pdf>.
Unlike "Earley 1970", Aycock and Horspool 2002 is
not easy
reading. I have been following this particular topic on and off for years and
nonetheless found this paper very heavy going.
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.
Mark's book opened my eyes to many new ideas. 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>.
Earley 1970¶
Of Jay Earley's papers on his general parsing algorithm, the most readily
available is "An efficient context-free parsing algorithm",
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 13:2:94-102,
1970.
Ordinarily, I'd not bother pointing out 35-year old nits in a brilliant and
historically important article. But more than a few people treat this article
as not just the first word in Earley parsing, but the last as well. Many
implementations of Earley's algorithm come, directly and unaltered, from his
paper. These implementers and their users need to be aware of two issues.
First, the recognition engine itself, as described, has a serious bug. There's
an easy fix, but one that greatly slows down an algorithm whose main problem,
in its original form, was speed. This issue is well laid out by Aycock and
Horspool in their article.
Second, according to Tomita there is a mistake in the parse tree representation.
See page 153 of "Grune and Jacobs 1990", page 210 of "Grune and
Jacobs 2008", and the bibliography entry for Earley 1970 in "Grune
and Jacobs 2008". In the printed edition of the 2008 bibliography, the
entry is on page 578, and on the web
(<
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG_2nd_Edition/CompleteList.pdf>), it's
on pp. 583-584. My methods for producing parse results from Earley sets do not
come from Earley 1970, so I am taking Tomita's word on this one.
Grune and Jacobs 1990¶
Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide, by Dick Grune and Ceriel Jacobs,
(Ellis Horwood Limited: Chichester, West Sussex, England, 1990). This book is
available on the Web: <
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html>
Grune and Jacobs 2008¶
Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide, by Dick Grune and Ceriel Jacobs,
2nd Edition. (Springer: New York NY, 2008). This is the most authoritative and
comprehensive introduction to parsing I know of. In theory it requires no
mathematics, only a programming background, but even so it is moderately
difficult reading.
This is "Grune and Jacobs 1990" updated. The bibliography for this
book is available in enlarged form on the web:
<
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG_2nd_Edition/CompleteList.pdf>.
Kegler 2013¶
My writeup of the theory behind Marpa, with proofs of correctness and of my
complexity claims is available online:
<
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9_mR_M2zOc4Ni1zSW5IYzk3TGc/edit?usp=sharing>.
Leo 1991¶
Marpa's handling of right-recursion uses the ideas in Joop M.I.M. Leo's "A
General Context-Free Parsing Algorithm Running in Linear Time on Every LR(k)
Grammar Without Using Lookahead",
Theoretical Computer Science,
Vol. 82, No. 1, 1991, pp 165-176. This is a difficult paper. Unfortunately,
there is no copy of it on-line.
Wikipedia¶
Wikipedia's article on Backus-Naur form is
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus-Naur_form>. It's a great place to
start if you don't know the basics of grammars and parsing. As Wikipedia
points out, BNF might better be called Panini-Backus Form. The grammarian
Panini gave a precise description of Sanskrit more than 23 centuries earlier
in India using a similar notation.
Copyright and License¶
Copyright 2014 Jeffrey Kegler
This file is part of Marpa::R2. Marpa::R2 is free software: you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Marpa::R2 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser
General Public License along with Marpa::R2. If not, see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
POD ERRORS¶
Hey!
The above document had some coding errors, which are explained
below:
- Around line 29:
- Expected text after =item, not a number
- Around line 40:
- Expected text after =item, not a number
- Around line 53:
- Expected text after =item, not a number