Submitted by Jonathan Goddard on Wed, 10/07/2019 - 11:45
Neel Krishnaswami and Jeremy Yallop received a Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award for their research paper "A Typed, Algebraic Approach to Parsing" at the PLDI 2019 conference, which took place in Arizona.
Their paper presents a new approach to parsing, the process of analysing the syntax of strings of symbols such as computer programs or English sentences. There are several existing approaches to writing parsers, each with different benefits: guarantees about good performance, ease of reasoning, modularity, etc. Krishnaswami and Yallop's work combines these benefits in a single system: a library of parser combinators that uses type checking and multi-stage programming to ensure that parsing executes efficiently in time proportional to the length of the input.
PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) is a series of conferences dating back to 1979, and describes itself as "the premier forum in the field of programming languages and programming systems research, covering the areas of design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance". This year the PLDI committee selected 6 papers (from 283 submissions) for Distinguished Paper Awards and 1 paper (from 47 submissions) for a Distinguished Artifact Award.
