bison

If anything having all the grammar rules already spelled out means another implementation can just reuse them, there are bison-like tools for almost any language.

Similarly, you won't be eating deer and bison in Greece, but you will be eating fish and olives.

There's the specific example of yacc/bison doing something similar to as your describing (at least for 1:N case).

Many of the horribly vulnerable parsers are generated with Bison / Flex, so it's not exactly a robust solution.

This resulted in a large number of improvements over the standard Unix tools (a great example being bison vs yacc).

If you have project that uses bison, yacc or byacc, try one of the other ones every once in a while.

Thinking about text parsing, if Bison generated Rust, then you'd have a memory-safe parser that should be about as efficient as C.

So yes.' There are about 200 thousand bison on 2000 farms in Canada alone.

Honest question, wouldn't you just write a lexer with yacc/bison for a DSL?

Now imagine doing that in the 1980s when none of those tools existed (it's why bison exists for programming language construction and the like).

Put a simpler way: you can buy cheap beef at the grocery store, but the bison farm down the road from me that sells grass-fed, pastured bison meat still has a 4-6 month backlog on orders...

You can buy bison meat at any grocery store here (it's delicious!).

There's been modern experimentation with "intensive grazing" to emulate what the early bison herds did to grasslands.

I've used Flex/Bison before, and it makes it easy to get started, but with more complex parsers, threading the state around quickly gets irritatingly annoying and I could see how bugs could arise from it.

C is so much the wrong language to write programming languages in, that they wrote Yacc, Bison, etc because programming parsers and lexers are so impossibly difficult to write in such a limited language like C, that people gave up, and made tools to generate C code for them.