[geeks] Parsing to memory

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, August 15, 2002 at 17:22:29 (-0400), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] Parsing to memory
>
> Does any one know any good texts on parsing things?  I guess this is one
> of those things should be tought in college, but they didn't say enough
> about the topic other than that state machines regular expressions and
> grammers are used.

Any good compiler course book will be a good start.....

Lexical analysis is only the first step in parsing.  That's usually
where you break up a string/stream of characters into tokens, and
syntactic analysis is what comes next as you try to figure out the
structure of the input.  After that comes interpreting or compiling or
some such task....

I'm sure you can find a zillion references online with Google or any
other decent search engine or computer science portal.  Here are some
interesting ones I found:

	http://members.shaw.ca/qjackson/cs/glossary/lexical_analysis.html
	http://members.shaw.ca/qjackson/ComputerScience.html

	http://www.sil.org/linguistics/computing.html

	http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/SEL-HPC/Articles/GeneratedHtml/comp.lex.html

	http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianh/lexical/references.html

	http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~eliuser/

	http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~libe50b/no16.pdf

> I was thinking of buying a lex book, but then decided I'd rather know
> how to really do it for myself first before leaning on lex.  

Using a lexical scanner generator like lex, flex, or something similar
is probably the best first approach.  Hand-built scanners usually suck.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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