I wrote a toy parser (or rather a parser specification in the syntax of a parser-generator) for COOL, and I’m wondering if mature, popular languages actually use these things to generate their parsers. The PMD project makes use of a (modified) copy of the JavaCC parser-generator definition for the Java grammar. Inspection of that file reveals the initial 1997 timestamp by author Sriram Sankar. According to Advances in Software Engineering, “The Java 1.1 grammar was developed by Sriram San...
