Red Shift: procedural shift-reduce parsing (vision paper)

Red Shift is a new design pattern for implementing parsers. The pattern draws ideas from traditional shift-reduce parsing as well as procedural PEG parsers. Red Shift parsers behaves like shift-reduce parsers, but eliminate ambiguity by always prioritizing reductions over shifts. To compensate the resulting lack of expressivity, reducers are not simple reduction rules but full-blown procedures written in a general-purpose host language. I found many advantages to this style of parser. In particular, we can generate high-quality error messages more easily; and compose different style of parsers. I also speculate about how Red Shift parsers may improve partial compilation in the context of an IDE.