On: Rob Pike on regular expressions in lexing and parsing

[carsongross]

You haven't lived until you've written a hand-rolled lexer and recursive descent parser.

[onan_barbarian → carsongross]

... or at least, you haven't done second-year CS. Pick one.

[carsongross → onan_barbarian]

Oh, that I could have been so lucky! I was stuck using lex and yacc. I had to work on an actual production parser before I saw the light.

[berntb → onan_barbarian]

I wish. There are multiple educated juniors at work which I've handheld. None of them has a course in compilers/parsing under the belt. Sigh, they probably got lives...