Most of the functional parsers published today focus on elegance. But they pay for this elegance by neglecting practical requirements such as efficiency and decent error handling. By contrast, a traditional parser (generator) based on LLor LR-principles focuses on efficiency and neglects issues such as elegance and understandability almost entirely. In this paper we combine these pragmatic issu...

Elegance is a prized quality in science that is associated with simplicity and explanatory power. This essay considers the qualities that make a scientific model, experiment, method, or theory "elegant," with a focus on the life sciences. We propose a definition of elegance that includes clarity, cleverness, correctness, explanatory power, parsimony, and beauty. The pursuit of elegance can impr...

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In a recent article, we argued that elegance is—or, better, should be—a central goal of scientific research (Nathan and Brancaccio, 2013). While researchers often praise the elegance and beauty of theories and experiments, elegance itself is usually treated as an accessory ornament and not a goal of science per se. Against this view, we suggested that elegance is an intrinsic feature of success...