A road named NoNameUno

It's parsing and not much different from what I said in the title. Yes, it is wild wild west. As you go along doing your day to day business, no matter how hard you try not to think about it, you eventually end up with stuff that you will feel that it is in your finger tips or you it is far out!

Parsing is one such thing when you try to program. I've  seen many different mistakes and not so intuitive for lot of people ( including me). So what is parsing, pattern matching etc.???

A bit of a history first, if you don't happen to know. Long long back, computers were very specific to do one type of computation or other. So there were computers for scientific computation, some were for massive data proccessing and business computations. So a genralization effort brought them together to have universal ( sort of ) computers where you can do many different types of computations. Currently, it is just simply taken for granted.

Now, for tackling interesting and somewhat big problems, there were already few languages sutiable to specific use, instead of using almost machine level language Assembler. For example, Fortran for scientific computation, Cobol for business computation.  There were others that came, did their service, and went away. Since some of these languages were to solve specific types of problems, they were bit awkward for other types of problems. Moreover, the I/O systems were thoughtout to  have block level interfaces ( specially to optimize system performance), and was directly exposed to the programs.

A major shift was that the I/O should be represented as a stream of something, and let the program interpret the way it wants. Most successful of this effort is the birth of C language, where stream of something was stream of characters. And the encoding for character is ASCII. Computer needs bits and bytes, not characters, not a word, not some formula... nothing.

So given a character stream what should I interpret it to, and how? This is where parsing comes to play. Basically what it means is that I, the program, want to interpret this stream this way, I know I can get meaningful information out of it.

No wonder, it is parshing county, Nevada in around 1850! Wild wild west, everyone has her own rule and interpretation!!

Parsing, to me still very elegant art, Art of Programming. It is mostly used to parse streams for computer language statment validation/interpretation. It has a rich foundation of computer science. Scanning a stream, giving it meaningful representation, then parsing is heart of computer languages and lots of other things. And to appreciate the beauty, and its non intuitive nature, just try to code up a program to parse a stream of text, and findout out if there is a valid c program statement. To be more specfic -

int main(){;;;;; return 0);} -  Is it a valid c program? And insert a dot ( . ) somewhere to see what it says. Very soon we will see that if-then-else, switch etc. going to make the program a living mess. And two questions we will have to answer (1) Is it correctly interpreting (2) Is it efficient?

So there has to be a science behind it too!!. If not, then why not would be the question for inquiring minds.

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