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2 points by rntz 5537 days ago | link | parent

Have you used Parsec? It's Haskell's parser-combinator library, and I noticed quite a few similarities. Haskell's typeclasses also turn out to provide a lot of general abstractions that can be applied to parser-combinators as well; for example, your 'on-result is approximately equivalent to Haskell's 'fmap, which is the function for genericised mapping. (And of course there's the fact that the parsec parser type is a monad, but I won't get into that...)

On a side note, Parsec is a little different in nature, because it distinguishes between a failure without consuming input (soft) and failure after consuming input (hard); soft failures fall back to the closest enclosing alternation, while hard failures fall back to the nearest enclosing "try" block, and then become soft failures. This means that, if you're careful, you can write with Parsec without having to worry about the exponential blowup typical of the parser-combinator approach. I'd be interested to see whether your JSON parser has any such pathological cases.



2 points by aw 5537 days ago | link

I have used Parsec. One of the most dramatic differences is that Parsec supports backtracking, and so it's a more powerful parser. Since parsing JSON doesn't need backtracking, I got to avoid both the complexity of implementing backtracking and the need to carefully avoid exponential backtracking blowups :D

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