Kingdom of the Machine: The Tale of Operators and Commands
summary
Compares hand‑written Pratt/recursive‑descent parsing used in Prism with generator approaches and shows three concrete pain points: TokenBeginsExpressionP that must enumerate ~100 tokens to decide endless range and return behavior, parseExpressionTerminator that inspects node kinds to reject invalid command positions, and operator binding power that breaks when precedence changes by context. Runs GPT‑5.4 to propose grammar and action rewrites and accepts its patch‑style LALR changes as "reasonably working" while noting the AI misses some corner cases.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to the kingdom
- 1:38Pratt parser basics and issues
- 6:17TokenBeginsExpressionP function
- 12:07Parse expression terminator
- 13:57Postfix rescue and binding power
- 16:14Three layers of parser knowledge
- 19:09Grammar ambiguity in Go
- 23:11Ambiguity in Ruby patterns
- 24:17AI and grammar fixes
- 28:46Conclusion and future
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