On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Kim-Ee Yeoh <ky3@atamo.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 5:19 AM, Konstantine Rybnikov <k-bx@k-bx.com> wrote:
> as a beginner had a lot of headache starting from outdated documentation in
> various places, lack of more tutorials, confusion between Text.Parsec and
> Text.ParseCombinator modules and so on.

You're indeed right.

> While I solved most of my problems via googling / reading stackoverflow /
> reading source code (of outdated version first, btw, the one I got from
> Daan's homepage :), I still had a feeling all the time that I'm doing
> something wrong and that I can't find place where "party is going on".

If you look at the dates of the papers on Wikipedia [1], the party was
totally hoppin' in the last decade of the previous century. Not so
much since. Sigh.

> So I wondered, what can I do to create a community around Parsec, to get
> issue tracking, pull-requests, up-to-date comprehensive documentation and
> tutorials etc.? Parsec seems like a perfect candidate for something like
> this.

While the experience is still fresh in your mind, may I suggest that
you write a note or two on the most confusing things you encountered
and how you dealt with them? Making your notes public is a way of
gathering a community around shared experiences.

These things are mostly small ones. The main issue is outdated tutorial [3] page. From what I can remember now:

1. my confusion definitely began with export-confusion (explaining about Parsec3 / Parsec2, Text.Parsec and Text.ParseCombinator modules) in various places (realworldhaskell book [1], parsec's homepage [2])

2. also, while [2] looks like a homepage for parsec, it's also quite old and points to old version of sources, for example.
2. new parsec3 API (and examples with monad-transformer, parsing of Text) should be added to [3]. The thing I was looking for (and began implementing just before I noticed my parsec is too old and new one has what I need) was also from new API, it was anyToken function. So I was able now to write:

skipWhileNot p =
do { try (lookAhead p) }
<|> do { anyToken;
skipWhileNot p }

combinator that would let me skip pieces of information I can't parse.

3. add type declarations and explanation into [3]

4. documentation [3] should be split into multiple pages with better navigation

5. not a concrete suggestion, but just adding more examples would be great

I'm sure there were plenty concrete suggestions / small improvements that I already forgot. I absolutely agree that it's better to write notes when memories are fresh, that's why I think having issue tracking and ability to do small pull-requests would really help.

Also, the denizens of the haskell IRC at freenode will gladly converse
with you about parsec. The same goes for subscribers to this list and
also haskell-beginners.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parser_combinator

-- Kim-Ee

It's great that haskell community is such welcome for beginners, thanks.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/using-parsec.html
[2] http://legacy.cs.uu.nl/daan/parsec.html
[3] http://legacy.cs.uu.nl/daan/download/parsec/parsec.html