alt Hacker NewsThe Dragon book is not very good, to be honest.
It was probably decent when all you had was something like Pascal and you wanted to write a C compiler.
Parsing and compiling and interpreting etc are all much more at home in functional languages. Much easier to understand there. And once you do, then you can translate back into imperative.
For parsing: by default you should be using parser combinators.
Replies
I was just going into the second quarter of compiler design when the dragon book came out. My copy was still literally “hot of the press” — still warm from the ink baking ovens. It was worlds better that anything else available at the time.
The Dragon book wasn't good for me either but I'd disagree about using parser combinators. The problem that I'd see the Dragon book having is basically starting to use concepts (phases of compilation) before it introduces and motivates them in the abstract. I can see how people who already know these concepts can look at the Dragon book and say "oh, that's a good treatment of this" so perhaps it's good reference but it's problematic for a class and terrible to pick up and try to read as a stand alone (which I did back in Berkeley in the 80s).
As far as I can tell, parser combinators are just one way that promises to let "write a compiler without understanding abstract languages" but all these methods actually wind-up being libraries that are far complicated than gp's "recursive descent + pratt parsing", which is easy once you understand the idea of an abstract language.
Is there a production compiler out there that doesn't use recursive descent, preferably constructed from combinators? Table-driven parsers seem now to be a "tell" of an old compiler or a hobby project.