> No, working from an spec written as an algorithm is easier than working from ABNF plus some inconvenient prose constraints.
That sounds very unlikely.
I’ve implemented my own parsers for countless specs – plaintext or binary, and the parsers that are written as imperative algorithms are insanely complicated to implement as functional implementations.
I end up with horrifying code, while the specs written as ABNF are much easier to translate into pattern matching code.
The specs written as algorithm only work fine for a single type of implementation IME, while the ABNF specs work equally well for all types.
Not really.
> Wouldn’t it have been easier if the syntax was formally defined as ABNF, and could be translated into code in a matter of days?
No, working from an spec written as an algorithm is easier than working from ABNF plus some inconvenient prose constraints.
(With the exception of template element support, I wrote the HTML parser used in Firefox and Validator.nu.)