A Little Parlor Game As I pointed out earlier here, in this parser space, there is a great tendency to express concepts — that, once understood, are actually quite simple — in a very abstruse, obfuscated manner. Recently, I was musing about a little conceptual experiment with some real comic potential. Imagine if basic Mathematics …
Since I started my work on resuscitating the JavaCC project, at least a couple of people have asked me how I can do this work if I have no theoretical background in computer science, specifically all this theory behind grammars and parsers. My response has typically amounted to saying: Watch me! I don’t know about …
Is All this Parsing theory just bullshit or what? Read More »
It was at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that 22-year-old German student Norbert Südhaus had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame — or infamy, rather. As a prank, he snuck into the stadium (security was much more lax back then) just before the winner of the marathon, the American Frank Shorter, was set to …
Thomas Hobbes famously said that in humankind’s natural state, a man’s life tends be "nasty, brutish, and short". I suppose the natural corollary of this is that in technologically advanced societies, life is comparatively "pleasant, peaceful, and long". Of those three things, it is the last one that can be measured most objectively; we see, …