Laurence Tratt: Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn’t
After the creation of programming languages themselves, parsing was one of the first major areas tackled by theoretical computer science and, in many peoples eyes, one of its greatest successes. The 1960s saw a concerted effort to uncover good theories and algorithms for parsing. Parsing in the early days seems to have shot off in many directions before, largely, converging. Context Free Grammars (CFGs) eventually “won”, because they are fairly expressive and easy to reason about, both for practitioners and theorists.