I have been a happy user of PEG grammars for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression

I have been a happy user of PEG grammars for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar In particular this lua implementation: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html It let's you write stuff like this: list <- (name s)* name <- [a-z][a-z]* s <- %s* Features: - Looks like EBNF - Regular expressions are a subset - Fast parser.