Parsing Expression Grammars, or PEGs, are syntax-oriented parser generators, meant to ease the task of building rich programming languages. I had had the opportunity to tinker with PEGs sparingly and, finally, I got around to reading the original paper (available here: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/packrat/popl04/). My reading notes from the paper can be downloaded here:
http://www.mad-computer-scientist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/peg.html
I am fully aware that this is not, as it were, a new paper. It came up originally in my searches for a good parsing library in Common Lisp. For the project that it was intended for, I ultimately moved on to using Ometa. While Ometa is a fine system, it actually did not win on power grounds because, quite simply, I do not need the extra expressiveness for what I am working on. It won out because the implementation was better than the PEG library I had tried.
As it is kind of old territory, my review has little to say. In reality, when I first ran across PEGs I felt strangely out of the loop, but here goes anyway:
PEGs are a powerful mechanism for defining parsing grammars. The form of the language itself is similar to standard EBNF in its general layout, but allows native creation of grammars. It avoids the ambiguities inherent to Context Free Grammars by using prioritized selection of paths through the grammar. As a result, it is actually more powerful than traditional CFGs while being simpler to use.
While PEGs seem to have also caught on a lot better across than its predecessors (discussed in the paper), the seem to receive less notice than Ometa, which further builds on PEGs.