On 19 Sep 2014, at 7:11 am, Loup Vaillant-David <l...@loup-vaillant.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After spending months banging my head over Earley Parsing, I have
> decided to write a tutorial. Ian once said Earley parsing is simple
> and easy to implement. I agree with "simple", but not with "easy".
> The required background knowledge is not trivial.
>
Easy is pretty subjective! What's easy to my a 6 year old is not going to be
easy for a 50 year old, and vice versa.
Perhaps you mean approachable to someone of average intellect and cultural
heritage?
> This tutorial is an attempt to gather this knowledge in one place.
> Nothing fancy, no deep math, no proof of correctness. Just a
> (hopefully) intuitive explanation of the concepts, needed to implement
> Earley parsing. The goal is to help competent programmers who know
> little about parsing to write their own Earley parsing framework.
>
> So far, I have done most of the recogniser. The following pages are
> "done", and up for review:
>
> http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/
> http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/what-and-why
> http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/chart-parsing
> http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/recogniser
>
> Questions and criticisms are most welcome. I'd like to know about any
> factual inaccuracy, poor wording, confusing explanation… please don't
> hesitate to question anything, even the structure of this tutorial.
>
> Enjoy, and thanks,
> Loup.
I really like your writing style!
One criticism I'd have is there aren't any pointers to people who don't have
programming language construction backgrounds. So, perhaps adding a
pre-requisite reading list at the beginning aimed at bringing someone who has
finished high school and nothing else "up to speed"...
This is perhaps my general criticism of most technical work. The assumed
knowledge is high, and it shouldn't be. As more and more people get involved in
computing, this means there can be less and less assumed backgrounds. I wrote
about good code and by extension good writing a while back here:
http://www.genericoverlords.com/good_coding
Julian
http://www.getcontented.com.au/ - You Need GetContented - Get Your Website
Happy. :)
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
fonc@vpri.org
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
