Packrat Parsing: A Literature Review

Packrat parsing is recently introduced technique based upon expression grammar. This parsing approach uses memoization and ensures a guarantee of linear parse time by avoiding redundant function calls by using memoization. This paper studies the progress made in packrat parsing till date and discusses the approaches to tackle this parsing process efficiently. In addition to this, other issues such as left recursion, error reporting also seems to be associated with this type of parsing approach and discussed here the efforts attempted by researchers to address this issue. This paper, therefore, presents a state of the art review of packrat parsing so that researchers can use this for further development of technology in an efficient manner. Keywords—Parsing Expression Grammar; Packrat Parsing; Memoization; Backtracking