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Parse-Marpa-0.001_029
/ Parse::Marpa::ALGORITHM

NAME

Parse::Marpa::ALGORITHM - Description of Parse::Marpa's Algorithm

THE ALGORITHM

Marpa is essentially the parser described in John Aycock and R. Nigel Horspool's "Practical Earley Parsing", The Computer Journal, Vol. 45, No. 6, 2002, pp. 620-630. This combines LR(0) with Jay Earley's parsing algorithm. His most accessible paper is J. Earley, "An efficient context-free parsing algorithm", Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 13:2:94-102, 1970.

The Aycock and Horspool paper is on the web (http://www.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/Publications/PracticalEarleyParsing.pdf), unlike Earley's, and it summarizes Earley's very nicely. It is not, however, easy reading. I have a degree in the subject, and have been following this particular topic on and off for years. I'd also unsuccessfully attempted to work out many of the same problems myself, which gives me some advantage in understanding the issues that Aycock and Horspool solved. Nonetheless I found the Aycock and Horspool paper very difficult going.

The rest of this document describes only my improvements to the work of Aycock, Horspool and Earley, and does not repeat the details of the algorithm described in their papers and elsewhere. I focus on my improvements because they have not been documented previously. I hope the reader does not allow this to confuse him into thinking most of the algorithm in Marpa is mine. That's not correct. The major part of the algorithm, and not a few of the implementation ideas, are due to Aycock, Horspool and Earley.

My first improvement was to Aycock and Horspool's internal rewriting of the grammar. Aycock and Horspool call their rewriting NNF (Nihilist Normal Form). Earley's original algorithms had serious issues with nullable symbols and productions, and NNF fixes most of them. (A nullable symbol or production is one which could eventually parse out to the empty string.) Importantly, NNF also allows complete and easy mapping of the semantics of the original grammar to its NNF rewrite, so that NNF and the whole rewrite process can be made invisible to the user.

My problem with NNF grammar is that the rewritten grammar is exponentially larger than the original in the theoretical worst case, and I just don't like exponential explosion, even as a theoretical possibility in pre-processing. Furthermore, I think that in some cases likely to arise in practice (Perl 6 "rules" with significant whitespace, for example), the size explosion, while not exponential, is linear with a very large multiplier.

My solution was is Chomsky-Horspool-Aycock Form (CHAF). This is Horspool and Aycock's NNF, but with the further restriction that no more than two nullable symbols may appear in any production. (In the literature, the discovery that any context-free grammar can be rewritten into productions of at most a small fixed size is credited to Noam Chomsky.) The shortened CHAF production maps back to the original grammar, so that like NNF, the CHAF rewrite can be made invisible to the user. With CHAF, the theoretical worst behavior is linear, and in those difficult cases likely to arise in practice the multiplier is smaller.

My second improvement was to extend the scanning step of Earley's algorithm, and to introduce the "earleme" (named after Jay Earley). Previous implementations required the Earley grammar's input to be broken up into tokens, presumably by lexical analysis of the input using DFA's (deterministic finite automata, which are the equivalent of regular expressions when that term is used in the strictest sense). Requiring that the first level of analysis be performed by a DFA hobbles a general parser like Earley's.

Marpa loosens the restriction, by allowing the scanning phase of Earley's algorithm to add items not just to the current Earley set and the next one, but to any later Earley set. Since items can be scanned onto several different Earley sets, so that the input to the Earley scanning step no longer has to be deterministic. Several alternative scans of the input can be put into the Earley sets, and the power of Earley's algorithm harnessed to deal with the indeterminism.

In the new Marpa scanner, each scanned item has a length in "earlemes", call it l. If the current Earley set is i, a newly scanned Earley item is added to Earley set l+i. The earleme is the distance measured in Earley sets, and an implementation can sync earlemes up with any measure that's convenient. For example, the distance in earlemes may be the length of a string, as measured either in ASCII characters, or UNICODE graphemes. Another implementation may define the earleme length as the distance in a token stream, measured in tokens.