A Tour of the Patterns

This section is a road map of this book’s 31 language implementation patterns. Don’t worry if this quick tour is hard to digest at first. The fog will clear as we go through the book and get acquainted with the patterns.

Parsing Input Sentences

Reader components use the patterns discussed in Chapter 2, Basic Parsing Patterns and Chapter 3, Enhanced Parsing Patterns to parse (recognize) input structures. There are five alternative parsing patterns between the two chapters. Some languages are tougher to parse than others, and so we need parsers of varying strength. The trade-off is that the stronger parsing patterns are more complicated and sometimes a bit slower.

We’ll also explore a little about grammars (formal language ...

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