Cracking the 500 Language Problem

Authors
Ralf Lämmel and Chris Verhoef

Abstract
We explain what the 500 language problem is, why it is a relevant problem, and why solutions are needed. We propose a solution, which is rapid development of renovation parsers by stealing grammars. We illustrate this by applying this approach to two non-trivial but representative languages: a proprietary real-time language from the telecommunications industry, and a well-known dialect of the most popular language in the world: IBM's VS Cobol II. We share the lessons we learned with our efforts to solve the 500 language problem.

Bibtex entry 
@Article{LV-500,
 author = "R.~L{\"a}mmel and C.~Verhoef",
 title = "{Cracking the 500-Language Problem}",
 journal = "IEEE Software",
 month = nov # "/" # dec,
 year = 2001,
 pages = "78--88",
 note = "Paper available online at \url{http://www.cs.vu.nl/grammars/500/}"
}

Article