Python parser generators

[Dave Kuhlman]

François Pinard wrote:

> [anton muhin]
> 
>> Can someone give an overview of existing Python parser
>> generators?
>> [...] I'm rather looking for convenience and expressiveness.
> 
> Hello, Anton.
> 
> I looked at a few, but did not look at them all, and finally
> settled for
> SPARK for production.  (I do not fully understand why a few
> generators which were written after SPARK did not at least recycle
> its elegance.)
> 
> SPARK is not blazing fast, but is not inordinately slow either,
> _given_
> you write reasonable grammars.  By "reasonable", I do not mean
> small,
> we indeed use some rather big ones here.  But I mean grammars
> which are rather left-to-right-ly, and for which big inputs could
> be chumped into
> smaller syntactical units at lexical time.  In that way, each of
> the repeated call to a SPARK parser in an application is not given
> the whole
> input -- we found out that this is worth, and usually easy to do. 
> Our
> parsers are easy to maintain and very dependable.  We are happy
> with it.
> 

And, here is a link to a comparison document:

    http://www.python.org/sigs/parser-sig/towards-standard.html

The above article does not mention PLY.  I used PLY to write (most
of) a parser for the RELAX NG compact syntax.  PLY worked well for
me.   PLY is available at:

    http://systems.cs.uchicago.edu/ply/.  

The parser for the RELAX NG compact syntax might serve as a
reasonable example of how to use PLY.  It is available at:

    http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/relaxngcompact.html

And, I've written a bit of documentation on how to use Python parser
generators, which is at: 

    http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/python_201/python_201.html.

Dave

-- 
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dkuhlman at rexx.com