Hi All, One of the things I've been working on lately is some ASN.1 stuff.One of the first things I wrote in Haskell was an ASN.1 parser. It only worked for a subset, and I'm revisiting it to make it handle a larger subset. One of the things that gets messy is that in lots of places you can put either a thing or a reference to a thing (i.e. the name of a thing defined elsewhere). For example, consider the production: NamedNumber ::= identifier "(" SignedNumber ")" | identifier "(" DefinedValue ")" If we ignore the second alternative, the natural translation into a Parsec parser would look like: namedNumber = do name <- identifier val <- parens signedNumber return (name, val) Now to handle the second alternative is easy enough: namedNumber = do name <- identifier val <- parens (fmap Left signedNumber <|> fmap Right definedValue) return (name, val) however because names can be used before they are defined the result typegoes from being type NamedNumber = (Name,Integer) to type NamedNumber = (Name,Either Integer Name) Nothing too terrible so far. The messiness comes in when you considerthe number of places that you have to replace a type 't' with (Either t Name). I'd really like to avoid having to do this. If I were using Prolog, I could finesse the problem by introducing afree variable and filling it in when I come across the definition[*]. Logic variable backpatching. :-) So one possibility would be to return a closure: ... return $ \bindings -> (name,resolve val bindings) resolve :: (Either t Name) -> Map Name t -> t or something like that. Then when you get to the end, you apply the bindings and voila, out pops the simple type. I'm not sure this will work quite as well as it sounds. This sounds like a common problem type. Is there a well known solution to this sort of problem? cheers, Tom [*] And then at the end use var/1 to look for undefined names. Urk. Actually, if I were using Prolog in the way most Prolog programmers use it, I wouldn't be thinking about the types. -- Dr Thomas Conway drtomc@gmail.com Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.