I have no idea what you're working on, but I spent a few weeks this summer writing parsers and trying to figure out how to tackle the ugliness that seems to be inherent in hand-written recursive descent parsers. While I learned a lot, I am not an expert by a long shot. However I did find an interesting technique that is not well covered elsewhere.
I came across this* article, which uses JavaScript as the implementation language, and found it very interesting, in large part because this approach (Top down operator precedence) sort of pulls the precedence hierarchy out of the call graph of a recursive descent parser and into a table, but also because it's an approach that OOP (and JavaScript in particular) is well suited to. I've used it (in combination with traditional recursive descent) in a functional setting (Standard ML) as well, and would use it again, especially for parsing infix expressions (arithmetic expressions, type annotation expressions).
This is a bit of a tangent, but I thought you might be interested given the intersection of parsing and JavaScript. I've been meaning to write this up in a short blog post...
I like the precedence climbing algorithm since you can easily fit it into a normal recursive descent parser and it allows you to easily add new operators just by putting them in a table. See: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/08/02/parsing-expressions-...
The parser is a bastard mix of recursive descent and parser combinators borne out of looking at the Dragon Book and thinking "fuck me, 2000 pages? I'm sure I can remember some CS325...". The language will eventually have macros I'll use for the built-in operators. I guess it's a Lisp? The syntax is sweet-expressions, so infixes are {l op b} which is just (op a b).
I came across this* article, which uses JavaScript as the implementation language, and found it very interesting, in large part because this approach (Top down operator precedence) sort of pulls the precedence hierarchy out of the call graph of a recursive descent parser and into a table, but also because it's an approach that OOP (and JavaScript in particular) is well suited to. I've used it (in combination with traditional recursive descent) in a functional setting (Standard ML) as well, and would use it again, especially for parsing infix expressions (arithmetic expressions, type annotation expressions).
This is a bit of a tangent, but I thought you might be interested given the intersection of parsing and JavaScript. I've been meaning to write this up in a short blog post...
* http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html There's another article on this using Java as the implementation language: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/03/19/pratt-parsers-e...