Parsing technology traditionally consists of two branches, which correspond to the two main application areas of context-free grammars and their generalizations. Efficient deterministic parsing algorithms have been developed for parsing programming languages, and quite different algorithms are employed for analyzing natural language.
The Functional Treatment of Parsing provides a functional framework within which the different traditional techniques are restated and unified. The resulting theory provides new recursive implementations of parsers for context-free grammars. The new...