[Users] Piraha in the Flesh

[Ian Hinder]

On 7 Feb 2013, at 01:37, Steven R. Brandt <sbrandt at cct.lsu.edu> wrote:

> I've hacked a version of Cactus to use Piraha for parameter parsing. 

For those who don't know, Piraha is a parsing framework/library based on Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs).  This allows you to define the grammar of a language using a simple regular-expression-type language, and Piraha will use this to decode an input file into a hierarchical data structure of the parsed data (a "parse tree").  See http://code.google.com/p/piraha-peg/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar.  I have used Piraha (in its Java form) and found it very useful and quite easy.  Parsing input files using a formal grammar is much easier and more "correct" than writing a custom parser by hand.  I highly recommend it if you need to process textual input!

-- 
Ian Hinder
http://numrel.aei.mpg.de/people/hinder