🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

This was posted in HN, but I am curious how/if lobsters take notes.

This post provides a complete tour of Earley parsing along with Aycock's epsilon fix, Leo's right recursion optimization, and extraction of parse trees from parse forests. I am trying to see how useful [Pyodide](http://pyodide.readthedocs.io/) is when compared to Jupyter notebooks for students. I...

With the current exodus from twitter, many of us are looking to migrate to Mastodon and similar ActivityPub servers. For the good of Fediverse, it is important that we migrate to diverse instances rather than join one of the most popular. In particular because other Fediverse instances can block you...

[Here](https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1194550244496814081) is a twitter thread from the creator of the Hypothesis property testing framework for Python. Hypothesis is notable not just for being a practical property testing tool for Python, but more importantly (from my perspective) in the inno...

An old language from '90s, [Mercat](http://cowlark.com/mercat/) which has a full recursive descent [bootstrap compiler in AWK](http://cowlark.com/mercat/com.awk.txt).

I am looking for large Python projects that have completed transition to the type system successfully. So far, I know about [urllib3](https://lobste.rs/s/otsra0/tests_aren_t_enough_case_study_after), and [w3lib](https://github.com/scrapy/w3lib/pull/172). I also know about [typeshed](https://github.c...

Kuroko is a dialect of Python with explicit variable declaration and block scoping, with a lightweight and easy-to-embed bytecode compiler and interpreter. Importantly, it avoids a few gotchas in Python such as default parameters, and scoping rules, but stays generally compatible with Python. ...

Left recursion has traditionally been a weak point for [top down](https://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/individual/2018/05/lrecursion.html) recursive descent parsers. While there has been a number of solutions, these have typically been complex to implement. I think there might be ...

This was motivated by the [cockroachlabs's](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/calendar-versioning/) decision to switch to a calendar versioning. Their problem is that they want to signal a major change in features, but they do keep their backwards compatibility. For a lay-person, the major version ...

I am teaching a software design patterns unit next semester. It feels like the there should be some verification associated with some of the design patterns. For example, decorators for objects should be transparent, should allow recursive nesting, should allow reordering etc. Edit: What I am loo...

This post provides a complete tour of the L* algorithm for inferring input grammars for blackbox programs. It includes the PAC learning approach rather than the assumption of a minimally adequate teacher able to compare hypothesis to the original grammar, and hence more suitable for inferring input ...

This post provides a complete tour of Generalized LL (GLL) parsing along with GSS (graph structured stack) and extraction of parse trees from SPPF (shared packed parse forest). This is part of my ongoing effort to document various parsing algorithms. I am looking for feedback on structure as well...