Reparse – A comprehensive parser combinator for OCaml

by bikal • 6 years ago

38 7 6 years ago

aryx• 6 years ago

This is nice, but when your language will grow, why would you use that instead of lex/yacc? It's hard to beat a nice BNF grammar; In fact they felt the need to put the BNF grammar for the things they were parsing at the end of the README, because it's far more readable that those >* skip <* stuff.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

A good thing about parser combinators like this is that they’re unambiguous by construction.

I also find them much more controllable and manageable in practice. I think that’s a common experience with imperative parsing in general, as it’s the approach used in I’d say the majority of industrial compilers.

It's hard to beat a nice BNF grammar; In fact they felt the need to put the BNF grammar

The BNF grammar there is incomplete compared to their actual code, it’s just a sketch it doesn’t completely describe the accepted language, so hard to argue it’s better as you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it!

speps• 6 years ago

True the BNF grammar is easier to read but using lex/yacc doesn't mean easier to read: https://sites.ualberta.ca/dept/chemeng/AIX-43/share/man/info...

I much prefer parser combinators over anything else I've tried that generates code.

ghusbands• 6 years ago

Most language parsers don't use lex/yacc. Recursive descent, PEG and similar are more common.

smabie• 6 years ago

imo parser combinators are vastly easier to use, read and write than lex/yacc.

thedufer• 6 years ago

What's the advantage of this over existing OCaml parser-combinator libraries? The "Why Use Reparse?" section really sells parser-combinator libraries in general; as far as I can tell, it applies equally to all of angstrom, mparser, opal, and planck.

testcross• 6 years ago

the author wasn't aware of angstrom or other alternatives.

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-reparse-2-0-0/6868/5

Reparse – A comprehensive parser combinator for OCaml

Related Stories