What's the best way to explain parsing to a new programmer?

Posted by Daisetsu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Daisetsu
Published on 2010-05-28T23:55:19Z Indexed on 2010/05/29 0:02 UTC
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I am a college student getting my Computer Science degree. A lot of my fellow students really haven't done a lot of programming. They've done their class assignments, but let's be honest here those questions don't really teach you how to program.

I have had several other students ask me questions about how to parse things, and I'm never quite sure how to explain it to them. Is it best to start just going line by line looking for substrings, or just give them the more complicated lecture about using proper lexical analysis, etc. to create tokens, use BNF, and all of that other stuff? They never quite understand it when I try to explain it.

What's the best approach to explain this without confusing them or discouraging them from actually trying.

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