On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 15:00 -0500, Tommy M. McGuire wrote:
On 10 Oct 2008, at 7:05 pm, Jonathan Cast wrote:
Parsec makes recursive descent parsers as easy to use in Haskell as regexps are in Perl. No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to the thing it does best.
Is it wrong to use Parsec to parse regular expressions for a really simple regex engine[4]?
That looks about right. And, as you point out, it's easier to understand than a direct parser. I would also re-code the engine itself in Parsec, though (probably using a finite state machine implementation, which (I think; I haven't tried it yet) would end up looking rather like a manual unfolding along the lines of Koen Claessen's parallel parsing process [1]). jcc [1] http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/Papers/parsing-pearl.ps