Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide
(Out of print; for Second Edition see below or click here!)

Dick Grune and Ceriel J.H. Jacobs

VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Originally published by Ellis Horwood, Chichester, England, 1990; ISBN 0 13 651431 6

Description

This 320-page book treats parsing in its own right, in greater depth than is found in most computer science and linguistics books. It offers a clear, accessible, and thorough discussion of many different parsing techniques with their interrelations and applicabilities, including error recovery techniques. Unlike most books, it treats (almost) all parsing methods, not just the popular ones. See Preface + Introduction and/or Table of Contents for a quick impression.

The book features a 48 page systematic bibliography containing over 400 entries. A general context-free parser is supplied (Figure 12.1 and Figure 12.2) and discussed in detail.

No advanced mathematical knowledge is required; the book is based on an intuitive and engineering-like understanding of the processes involved in parsing, rather than on the set manipulations used in practice.

A short list of errata is available.

Additional Keywords: information technology, user-interface design, compiler construction, natural language processing, pattern matching, artificial intelligence.

About the authors

Dick Grune is a lecturer of Programming Languages and Compiler Construction at the VU University Amsterdam, and is a coauthor of the text books Programming Language Essentials and Modern Compiler Design.
Ceriel Jacobs has been working in compiler construction since the beginning of the 1980s and is now involved in the Manta project. He is a coauthor of the text book Modern Compiler Design .

Availability

The text of the book is available for downloading in PostScript format ( Front Page and Book Body (3.6 Mbytes of PostScript)) and in Acrobat Reader (PDF) format ( Front Page and Book Body (1.9 Mbytes of PDF)).
The annotated bibliography can also be downloaded separately as plain text in a refer-like format: Annotated Bibliography (221 kbytes).
A previous version of the PostScript file had a mangled Author Index. The corrected Author Index + Subjext Index (the last 10 pages of the book) can be downloaded separately, for those unfortunate enough to have printed out a damaged copy: Corrected Author Index + Subject Index.

Present status of the book: New second edition!

The new edition is finished and has been sent off to the publisher, Springer Verlag! The new edition features: generalized deterministic parsers, non-canonical parsers, linear-time substring parsing, parsing as intersection, and parallel parsing, in addition to the expanded and updated text of the first edition. And there are hundreds of additional literature summaries! For more information click here.

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[Dick Grune] [Ceriel Jacobs]

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