Parsing julia most definitely context sensitive. Have you looked at the implementation of the parser? going to the source always resolves any ambiguity and is the definitive reference as to why things are parsed the way they are. If scheme is not your cup of tea you can always play around with the julia parser written in Julia (search for JuliaParser.jl). Muck around and break things, play with turning on / off context sensitivity and see what happens. If you have a better way to resolve an ambiguity in the language I'm sure everyone here would love to hear about it.
>From experience I would say the only thing that bugs me about parsing julia is >how we deal with .operators. For instance there are ugly hacks to get around >the ambiguity of importing these operators from base (ex. Import Base.+, >likewise with extending the methods of these operators ( .+(args....) = >something). requiring parenthesis around dot operators when importing them or >extending them would resolve this ambiguity.m That is one concrete suggestion >I can make. Sorry no, I don't think we will ever adopt a parser generator approach to parsing the language. doing it by hand allows you to tweak the performance of the parser and to potentially give better error messages. End users do not care if we use a parser generator framework or not, so there is really no practical benefit. This is why almost allpopular languages rely on hand written parsers ( the only exception I can think of is Go but the syntax was designed from the beginning to be easy to parse).
