Ben Newman: September 2008 Archives

When Dana Gioia spoke at my undergraduate commencement, he met his naysayers with humor: “Some of you have complained that I am not famous enough. I couldn’t agree more. I am not nearly famous enough.” His latest project seems poised to put the record straight:

WASHINGTON—The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a 1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation’s aesthetic-industrial complex since the 850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

“America’s metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation’s verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart,” said the project’s head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. “We need to make sure America’s poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world.”

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Lately, in my spare time, I’ve been working on a pure-JavaScript packrat parser combinator. It supports left recursion, thanks to insights gleaned from this paper, and it’s usably fast (for a toy parser). Anyway, check it out. Eventually I plan to “compile” grammars written in standard EBNF syntax into native parsing expression grammars, though I don’t plan to implement backtracking, so the choice semantics will be those of a packrat parser.

I’ll explain the name in a later post.

I have let a
spider
loose in your
house old flame

and though
she will probably
have moths
for breakfast

Believe me
she makes a venom
stronger
than she needs