Dear Doaitse, thank you very much for your help.
I am curious to know what made you go wrong with the tutorial, and caused that you could not find the solution below?
Well let's first agree that I'm not very bright. I hate to admit it, but it's a simple fact ;-). Second let's agree that the uu-parsinglib is a *very* sophisticated beast, I have not seen anything else like it out there, my sincere congratulations for it. Thirdly the tutorial is also a very sophisticated beast, and forthly, well just see point 1 :-). And I just figured out why I was unable to write even that simple parser. The code you sent me works just fine, I copied and pasted it, no problems. But, as soon as I comment out the "main" function the type checker complains, because now the ghci's type checker can no longer infer the types of pDate or pDot. And this is exactly what happened. I kept getting error messages from ghci, eventhough I had defined my parsers possible correctly, but, *minus* the type signatures *and* minus any main function that called it. In hindsight I realize that this is a trap I have walked into many times before, I guess I still have not acquired a Haskellers intuition. I promise to do better next time :) Günther