I'm not sure the Earley paper "is full of bugs" - to the best of my knowledge, it has only one bug (albeit a biggy), which is in its description of how to create a parse tree.
Yes, that's part of the same bug, as I understand it anyway (to be clear: I'm not sure that anyone's claiming that there are problems with Earley's recogniser, which is really the core of his paper). Scott's "SPPF-Style Parsing From Earley Recognisers" gives an overview of the bug and its implications.
I can't remember off hand if it dealt with nullable terms or hidden left recursion properly either.
don't get me wrong: I like the earley parser :-) I just think the original paper has some omissions and the treatment of earley parsing in 'parsing techniques 2nd ed' is thorough and includes substantial references and explanations of further work.
