I worked at IBM research from 1997 until 2007, after finishing my PhD in compilers and programming languages.
About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was.
She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.
PEG is a particular parsing technique. Combinators are a technique for implementing parsers.
You can write a parser combinator library which uses PEG or packrat algorithms underneath.
In this blog post, the library that I'm using is basically building LL parse generators, not PEG. But you could easily implement a PEG-based combinator system.
I didn't do that, because I didn't want to get bogged down with explaining too much about parsing algorithms. The LL/recursive descent approach is pretty easy to understand when you see the grammar code. For PEG, I would have needed to spend more time explaining the algorithms, and the post was already too long!
About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was.
She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.