SPARK v.s. PLY

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> If you know the parsing stuff well, could you briefly tell me the
> pros. and cons. of those packages? (or some others you find good too)

I use spark and am very satisfied. Its usage is quite natural, and the power
of the earley parsing method ensures the grammars can be easy to write and
understand (close to bnf), as you don't have to care about left-factoring
and the like. In badly designed grammars, it can get quadratic (or even
worse I think, but I'm to lazy now to think about that thorougly..) in
runtime - but I never expirienced any real trouble with that. The
algorithms that afterwards run on the AST are usually complex themselves,
shadowing the parsing complexity. And as I said - only ambigue grammars
produce that overhead at all. 

I can't say anything about other parsers though - didn't use them. At least
not in python. 

-- 
Regards,

Diez B. Roggisch