Hacker News Reader

I can recommend anyone reading pratts original paper. Its written in a very cool and badass style.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/512927.512931

> Its written in a very cool and badass style.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? Do you mean you like the prose, or the typesetting, or...?

I cannot say what this person means, and I have never read this paper before, but just the fourth paragraph of the paper has piqued my interest and I will read it all.

He is a bit offensive towards traditional academia that favors BNF and parser generators. It's been a while since a read it but I remember e.g. a rhetoric question (not exactly cited but by meaning): "Has anyone learned a programming language by reading the BNF?"

The style is very good and fun to read for someone who also reads other more boring papers.

For some reason I struggled to get my head around Pratt parsing. Then I read an offhand comment on Reddit that said to start with a recursive descent parser and add table parsing to that. Once I did that it all clicked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com