Tillmann,
I've been looking into you packages, very neat ideas and a nice
implementation really.
I've already implemented a toy example and it worked great. Now I am trying
to use your library in a more serious piece of code, and I've realised that
defineIsomorphisms doesn't support record constructors. To be precise, you
handle the case for NormalC in the code, however you do not handle RecC. I
don't think this will be a difficult thing to add. Is there any reason for
you not to support RecC?
Best,
2011/1/26 Tillmann Rendel
Hi Ozgur,
Ozgur Akgun wrote:
I can write (separately) a parser and a pretty-printer [...]
Is there any work to combine the two?
Brent Yorgey wrote:
Maybe take a look at "Invertible Syntax Descriptions: Unifying Parsing and Pretty Printing" by Tillmann Rendel and Klaus Ostermann from last year's Haskell Symposium:
http://www.informatik.uni-marburg.de/~rendel/unparse/
It's a beautiful paper, and perhaps the code will work for you (although it's too bad it's not on Hackage).
Indeed, I started this project for exactly the reason Ozgur describes: I needed to duplicate a lot of information between parsers and pretty printers and was annoyed about it. With invertible syntax descriptions, I now write a single program, which looks like a combinator parser (think "Parsec"), but can work as a pretty printer, too.
I just uploaded the code from the paper (and some additional combinators) to Hackage:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/partial-isomorphisms http://hackage.haskell.org/package/invertible-syntax
I use this code for the implementation of some very small languages (think "lambda calculus"). This works fine.
I haven't really tried it for larger languages, but we have two students here in Marburg implementing a parser for Java using the library, so we are going to have experience with larger languages in a few weeks (months?).
If you give it a try, I would be happy to receive success stories, bug reports, patches, feature requests etc. I want to keep working on this, and I am open for suggestions.
Tillmann
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-- Ozgur Akgun