> why books on interpreters and compilers tend to avoid the question of parsing like the plague
They avoid it like old boring anecdote everyone read yet in their childhood in a dragonbook.
> parsing is over-emphasized in other books, and it's truly orthogonal to other PL activities.
Right, "parsing science" != "compiler science". Parsing science isn't even a subset of compiler science. It's just another discipline which touches (someone may even say overlaps) with it. Consider parsing a natural language. (Which btw any human does, but compiler stuff is surely not for a every human.)
They avoid it like old boring anecdote everyone read yet in their childhood in a dragonbook.
> parsing is over-emphasized in other books, and it's truly orthogonal to other PL activities.
Right, "parsing science" != "compiler science". Parsing science isn't even a subset of compiler science. It's just another discipline which touches (someone may even say overlaps) with it. Consider parsing a natural language. (Which btw any human does, but compiler stuff is surely not for a every human.)