Structured Grammars are Effective

Abstract: Top-down parsing has received much attention recently. Parsing expression grammars (PEG) allows construction of linear time parsers using packrat algorithm. These techniques however suffer from problem of prefix hiding. We use alternative formalism of relativized regular expressions REGREG for which top-down backtracking parser runs in linear time. This formalism allows to construct fast parsers with modest memory requirements for practical grammars. We show that our formalism is equivalent to PEG.