Parsers for Programming Languages.

[Matthew Estes <address@hidden>]

	I've recently been doing some research into parsers and I have some 
questions. I'm not sure if this is the best group to ask this in, but since 
a) I was motivated to explore parsing because of interests in learning 
about programming languages b) the goal of my research is to make it easier 
to design programming languages I figure it would be a relevant topic.
	I was wondering if anyone knows much about 2-level grammars and other 
"general techniques". I have read the paper "Practical LL(1)-based Parsing 
of van Wijngaarden Grammars" by A.J. Fisher(1985, Acta Informatica 21, pg 
559-584, no online copy available) and it was very much along the lines of 
what I'm interested, but I can't seem to find any more recent work(and 15+ 
years is a long time in Computer Science). I've heard of affix grammars, 
and maybe thats where I should go, but I like more general rather than 
less, and 2-level grammars seemed to be the right combination of 
readability/usability along with a snowball's chance of being able to be 
used by a formal technique or parser generator of some kind.
	Maybe this is a dead end, but I like the idea of parsing and 
compiling/interpreting being consumed more by higher level techniques so 
that it becomes easier to experiment with the constructs being 
modelled/attempted. I'm also interested in natural language applications as 
well.
	Any thoughts would be appreciated.

								Matt Estes