grammars

The idea is that by sticking to context-free grammars, protocols will be easier to parse, and the bulk of memory corruption errors can eliminated.

More than just a visualization of Ruby's grammar, it also has visualizations of Java and JavaScript's grammars.

And most people forget that old computer scientists were obsessed with creating grammars that you could write formal proofs for.

Many things aren't possible with regular expressions and many grammars aren't parsable with regular expressions.

Lua's LPeg lets you create simple recursive grammars to solve problems that are often hard with regular expressions (e.g., matching balanced parentheses).

Perl 6's regular expressions and grammars appear to be fairly powerful and useful.

There is all the wasted effort, like generative grammars of endangered languages that relied on morphology rather than syntax to communicate the same information.

Problems arise with regular expressions when they are used against irregular grammars.

In fact, they correspond to completely different grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy.

Example here [1] I got it to work for recursively defined context free grammars with some fun [2] deferred function reference trickery.

What do you lose by sticking to context-free grammars?

Holy fucking shit perl grammars and actions are cool.

To sum it all up: most "regular expression" implementations are actually powerful enough to describe context-free grammars, which are essentially regular expressions mixed with balanced parentheses.

I stopped reading at: "Besides, grammars are more complex than regular expressions, so they're simpler."

Part of the point of Perl 6 was to remove the bits in Perl 5 that were problematic (including some "too cute/weird" stuff) and to introduce much nicer higher level abstractions (eg grammars instead of just regexes[5]).

The article even agrees with you: > §3 sets out a radically revised structure for transformational grammars, quietly abandoning the notion of “kernel sentence” from Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, and introducing the term “deep structure,” which in a sense replaces it.