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31.2 Aycock and Horspool 2002

Marpa is based on ideas from John Aycock and R. Nigel Horspool’s “Practical Earley Parsing”, The Computer Journal, Vol. 45, No. 6, 2002, pp. 620-630. The idea of doing LR(0) precomputation for Earley’s general parsing algorithm (see Bibliography-Earley-1970), and Marpa’s approach to handling nullable symbols and rules, both came from this article.

The Aycock and Horspool paper summarizes Earley’s very nicely and is available on the web: http://www.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/Publications/PracticalEarleyParsing.pdf. Unlike Earley’s 1970 paper (see Bibliography-Earley-1970), Aycock and Horspool 2002 is not easy reading. I have been following this particular topic on and off for years and nonetheless found this paper very heavy going.