Parsing Algorithms

Course overview

Parsing or syntactic analysis is one of the first stages in designing and implementing a compiler. A well–designed syntax of your programming language is a big motivation why users would prefer and choose exactly your language.

The problem with “parsers theory” in classic compiler schools and books is that this theory is often considered as “too advanced”, going right into complicated formal descriptions from the Theory of Computation and formal grammars. As a result students may lose an interest in building a compiler already at parsing stage.

The opposite problem often seen in describing a parser is a superficial approach describing only manual (usually recursive descent) parsing, leaving the students with issues understanding the actual techniques behind the automated parsers.

I believe this deep dive into the parsing theory should be combined together with a hands–on approach, which goes in parallel and allows seeing all the learned theoretical material on practice.

In the Essentials of Parsing (aka Parsing Algorithms) class we dive into different aspects of the parsing theory, describing in detail the LL and LR parsers. However at the same time to make the learning process and understanding easy and fun, we build in parallel an automatic parser for a full programming language, similar to JavaScript or Python, from scratch.