Parallel parsing

[Jay Nelson]

Richard O'Keefe wrote:

 > I wanted to see if multicore systems could do IR faster

Talk about synchronicity...

I've never been too enamoured with the modern method of
using grammar notation and yacc / lex etc. to do something
like, say, parse XML or a programming language.  It works
for multiple languages easily, but it seemed so heavy handed
and ugly to me.

My big bone was that it is very, very serial.  And no real way
to undo that.

I have been playing with the old pattern-based, weak methods
of parsing because I think they can be made highly parallel
and would benefit from SMP.

I can see plenty of ways to parallelize a lookup against the
index of words or parse tree or whatever, but not so many
in generating the index.

Anybody else having ideas in this area they are willing to share?

jay