Welcome back! Previously, on Optimising Recursive Ascent Parsing, we explored the ideas from a 1990 paper called Optimizing Directly Executable LR Parsers by Peter Pfahler. With the paper’s example grammar, and the described optimisations, we managed to optimise away 6 out of 15 states in the parser. But that’s peanuts compared to what we’ll do in this post! We’ll be taking inspiration from another 1990 paper, this one is called Even Faster LR Parsing by Nigel Horspool and Michael Whi...
