Evaluating and Improving Recursive Descent Parsers

Time formulas are symbolic formulas which express the execution time of a program as a function of its input data and of variables representing the time to execute individual operations (e.g., push, pop, transfer, etc.). It is shown that in many cases the time formulas for recursive descent parsers may be generated automatically by a simple inspection of the parser code. These time formulas are instrumental in estimating the gains attained by various types of optimizations. Several of these optimizations are presented and their efficiency gains are estimated. A parser for a simple programming language is generated, optimized, and evaluated using the proposed techniques.