Which tools in particular do you feel are acceptable? "Just writing the code to parse the language" is almost definitional of shotgun parsers, so it sounds like

Which tools in particular do you feel are acceptable? "Just writing the code to parse the language" is almost definitional of shotgun parsers, so it sounds like you are advocating an ad-hoc parser (probably something recursive descent-ish, or perhaps with even less structure than that), but I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth. ADDENDUM: In particular, the article mentions PEGs. Not in an unambiguously positive light, but nonetheless: do you count PEGs as being a useless overly academic tool? The LANGSEC project has done (in my opinion) a pretty good job arguing that this behavior causes many security issues in software. Perhaps only to some extent for programming languages in general, but in particular for data format languages and network protocols. The issue is slightly mitigated for programming languages because they typically don't have many wildly varying parsers; but (programming) languages without clearly specified grammars certainly have had problems with this in the past. Are you familiar with their work? Do you just disagree with their conclusions? [LANGSEC]: http://langsec.org http://langsec.org