On: Dartmouth computer scientists expanding diff, grep Unix tools

[bazzargh]

Interesting that they'd go for context-free grammars rather than PEG? A few years ago someone created a PEG-matcher lua lib, similarly aimed at replacing regexps: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/peg.pdf And Ward Cunningham's exploratory parser: https://github.com/AboutUs/exploratory-parsing

Is there a link to the paper somewhere?

[zeugma → bazzargh]

here : http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2011-705.pdf It is sad we have to dig for it, it should be the first link in the article.

[bazzargh → zeugma]

Thanks.

Having read the paper, it seems its more specialized to cisco IOS config files - they're building a library of patterns you can match against, the paper doesn't explain how you can add your own. And it does seem to be CFG rather than PEG - there's a separate token library.

Ward's work looks more usably generic than this, it's not cited so I presume they weren't aware of it.