6.9. Transformative Technologies

You mentioned that yacc made experimentation with the syntax of a language easier, because you could update your grammar and run that again, rather than tweaking a hand-rolled direct descent parser. Was yacc a transformative technology?

Brian: Certainly for language development, yacc was an enormous influence. Speaking personally, I would never gotten off the ground doing language work without it, because for whatever reason, I wasn't any good at writing recursive descent parsers. I always had trouble with precedence and associativity.