Dr. Lionel Parreaux and PhD Student Mr. Luyu Cheng Received the ECOOP 2026 Distinguished Artifact Award

Dr. Lionel Parreaux and PhD student Mr. Luyu Cheng from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at HKUST have been honored with the Distinguished Artifact Award at the 40th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2026). This prestigious accolade is reserved for the top 10% of accepted artifacts, underscoring the exceptional quality of their research.

Their award-winning paper, "A Simple Recipe for Writing Decent Recursive Descent Parsers (Pearl)," demonstrates that parsing well-designed languages should be intuitive for both people and machines. By revisiting Vaughan Pratt's foundational 1973 ideas on intuitive syntax, the researchers present a highly effective, modern approach to handwritten recursive-descent parsing in a functional language.

The artifact covers the full syntax of a simple programming language while successfully avoiding the common pitfalls of ad-hoc implementations. It also provides a practical guide on how to build extensible parsers that automatically generate a clear, readable description of the accepted syntax, illustrated elegantly with a variant of Caml Light.

Congratulations to Dr. Parreaux and Mr. Cheng on this outstanding academic achievement!

Details of the award winning paper

About ECOOP

ECOOP is Europe's longest-standing annual Programming Languages conference, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and students to share their ideas and experiences in all topics related to programming languages, software development, systems and applications.