Russ Cox argues against a 2010 paper claiming 'Yacc is dead', defending Yacc's theoretical foundations in LR parsing and criticizing the paper for lacking rigorous theoretical grounding. He draws parallels to historical issues with regular expression implementations and emphasizes the importance of sound theory in parser design. The post serves as a technical rebuttal rather than announcing new developments.
Background
Yacc (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) is a classic Unix parser generator tool based on LR parsing theory, widely used in compiler construction. The 2010 paper by Might and Darais had claimed Yacc was obsolete, sparking debate in programming communities.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026 at 04:37 AM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10