> But why are we doing this to ourselves, right? These parsing tools work great! (As long as you only do half do the job you were trying to do and then sort of

> But why are we doing this to ourselves, right? These parsing tools work great! (As long as you only do half do the job you were trying to do and then sort of hack it back together afterward.) I agree with you in practice: The current parser generators are not as good as I'd like them to be. They are too restrictive and too locked into a "let's parse this subset of grammars mathematically optimally" instead of "let's make it easy for programmers to declare grammars". (Disclaimer: I started working on a completely new parser compiler https://www.sanity.io/blog/why-we-wrote-yet-another-parser-compiler https://www.sanity.io/blog/why-we-wrote-yet-another-parser-c... which is capable of parsing full context-free grammars. I personally believe this is part of the puzzle of making them more usable.) However, since we're talking about Ruby's syntax: I don't think Ruby's parser would be any nicer if it was handwritten. The problem here is that they discovered the power of "lexer tweaks parser state" and let it drive the design of the language. This has caused the language itself to be complicated (both for humans and for computers!) Unfortunately I don't have time for it, but I'd love to dive into the changes required in Ruby's syntax to make it context-free (e.g. pushing the local variable lookup into the bytecode generator).