Now all of these parsers are cool and all, but the real power comes in the composability of parsers. The Parser type supports many forms of composition that unlock the ability to break large, complex problems into simpler ones. And ideally we can be very confident that the small parsers do their job correctly, like the int and double parsers, and then we can be confident that we glued all the parsers together correctly.
Previous episode
Parser Combinators Recap: Part 2
Next episode
Unlock This Episode
Our Free plan includes 1 subscriber-only episode of your choice, plus weekly updates from our newsletter.
References
Combinators
Daniel Steinberg • Sep 14, 2018Daniel gives a wonderful overview of how the idea of “combinators” infiltrates many common programming tasks.
Note Just as with OO, one of the keys to a functional style of programming is to write very small bits of functionality that can be combined to create powerful results. The glue that combines the small bits are called Combinators. In this talk we’ll motivate the topic with a look at Swift Sets before moving on to infinite sets, random number generators, parser combinators, and Peter Henderson’s Picture Language. Combinators allow you to provide APIs that are friendly to non-functional programmers.
Parser Combinators in Swift
Yasuhiro Inami • May 2, 2016In the first ever try! Swift conference, Yasuhiro Inami gives a broad overview of parsers and parser combinators, and shows how they can accomplish very complex parsing.
Note Parser combinators are one of the most awesome functional techniques for parsing strings into trees, like constructing JSON. In this talk from try! Swift, Yasuhiro Inami describes how they work by combining small parsers together to form more complex and practical ones.
Regex
Alexander Grebenyuk • Aug 10, 2019This library for parsing regular expression strings into a Swift data type uses many of the ideas developed in our series of episodes on parsers. It’s a great example of how to break a very large, complex problem into many tiny parsers that glue back together.
Regexes vs Combinatorial Parsing
Soroush Khanlou • Dec 3, 2019In this article, Soroush Khanlou applies parser combinators to a real world problem: parsing notation for a music app. He found that parser combinators improved on regular expressions not only in readability, but in performance!
Learning Parser Combinators With Rust
Bodil Stokke • Apr 18, 2019A wonderful article that explains parser combinators from start to finish. The article assumes you are already familiar with Rust, but it is possible to look past the syntax and see that there are many shapes in the code that are similar to what we have covered in our episodes on parsers.
Sparse
John Patrick Morgan • Jan 12, 2017A parser library built in Swift that uses many of the concepts we cover in our series of episodes on parsers.
Note Sparse is a simple parser-combinator library written in Swift.
parsec
Daan Leijen, Paolo Martini, Antoine LatterParsec is one of the first and most widely used parsing libraries, built in Haskell. It’s built on many of the same ideas we have covered in our series of episodes on parsers, but using some of Haskell’s most powerful type-level features.
Parse, don’t validate
Alexis King • Nov 5, 2019This article demonstrates that parsing can be a great alternative to validating. When validating you often check for certain requirements of your values, but don’t have any record of that check in your types. Whereas parsing allows you to upgrade the types to something more restrictive so that you cannot misuse the value later on.
Ledger Mac App: Parsing Techniques
Chris Eidhof & Florian Kugler • Aug 26, 2016In this free episode of Swift talk, Chris and Florian discuss various techniques for parsing strings as a means to process a ledger file. It contains a good overview of various parsing techniques, including parser grammars.
0120-parsers-recap-pt2