Partial Evaluation of General Parsers – Slightly Revised

Applications of partial evaluation have so far mainly focused on generation of compilers from interpreters for programming languages. We partially evaluate a simple general LR(k) parsing algorithm. To obtain good results, we rewrite the algorithm using a number of binding-time improvements. The final LR(1) parser has been specialized using Similix, a partial evaluator for a higher order subset of Scheme [3]. The obtained specialized parsers are efficient and compact. Partial evaluation is responsible for the (equivalent of) the sets-of-items construction, and the construction of parsing tables. This paper is an extended abstract of [14].