Parse, Don't Validate (2019)

Software engineers like efficiently running software. Mathematicians like beautiful definitions. Scientists like non-trivial discoveries.

This paper.... uh.... what exactly is it good for?

I suppose it could be kind of nice as some kind of undergraduate paper writing project kind of thing but it looks too professional for that.... I am kind of at a loss why this was written. Maybe it is some strange kind of satire....

This paper is good for parsing/validating your source code (from the view-point of your compiler/interpreter).

Code is data after all.

It's written for sigbovik 2021 [1][2], which is very much a joke conference. Other papers this year were "Lowestcase and Uppestcase letters: Advances in Derp Learning" and "On the dire importance of mru caches for human survival (against Skynet)".

[1]: http://www.sigbovik.org/ [2]: http://www.sigbovik.org/2021/proceedings.pdf

SIGBOVIK is a parody of computer science conferences. It's a running joke hosted on April Fools Day every year at CMU - and apparently a quite convincing one. ;-)

Source: I attended SIGBOVIK a few times in grad school.