IFL 2007 - Day 2

Today only three sessions took place due to the excursion (a nice visit of Geldermann-Sektkellerei...). The first was about contracts, the second about Algorithms and Data Structures and the last one about Foundations. My talk was part of the second session, you can download it here: Graph Parser Combinators

My key learnings have been:

• Malcolm Wallace: polyparse, commit is the principle dual to try known from parsec, parsing can be done lazily

After my talk I got several advices:

• Why are (graph) parser combinators so powerful? They are aware of a context! Thus they are more powerful than general-purpose parsers for context-free languages. Thank you Malcolm for pointing this out!


• I have to try to generalize my approach such that it is usable for a broader range of problems (advice by Frank Huch).


• I should try not to pass the active node that much but instead should really try to hide it within the monad.


• A parser type should not depend on lists of tokens. I learned that Malcolm already abstracted from lists in a current version of polyparse (via type classes).