Comment by wglb

So it is a different world now than in 1996. Parsers are much more solved now than they were back then.

I've written production compiler, but well before the Dragon book was written. I found it valuable, but kind of after the fact.

The references that we used included "A Compiler Generator" by David B. Wortman, Jim Horning, William M. MacKeeman. There weren't that many other parser generators available at the time.

Lots of valuable work has been done to make parsers easier to write. At MWC, dgc (David G. Conroy, author of MicroEMACS, which is now 'mg' on most systems) said that "YACC parsers make the hard part harder and the easy part easier". He wrote the C compiler with a hand-crafted parser. Starting in assembler, then bootstrapped it to C. Of the folks you know that write compilers, I wonder if they started writing after 1996, or even 2006.

If you are simply a user of parsers, then maybe you don't need to know how they work.