Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there more obvious problems with the dragon book: in particular, ~300+ pages are spent focusing on techniques for doing parsing and lexing. Now if I want to write a baby yacc [sic], this might be useful. But in this modern era, parsing is a very well understood problem, with lots of easy to use tool. Yes in a production compiler helpful syntax and type error messages are key, but when you're learning the comp…
Even if you are writing a production compiler, you will likely not be using a tool, nor writing a tool, to generate the parser. Most production commercial compilers in practice use hand-written recursive descent with a hand-written lexer, which itself potentially uses feedback from the parser (very handy for parsing C or C++). Recursive descent usually gives context for error recovery that matches the way most progra…
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#41this is also very very very true. And thus why parsing combinator libraries are one of the sanest defaults one can adopt in dealing with parsing