Re: Parser Combinators in C

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, Koen Claessen wrote:
[cut]
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/ParserComboC/parser-combo-c.html
> 
> I thought it could be fun for Haskell programmers to see
> this. (One of the problems with this webpage is that I do
> not really know for who I am writing it...)
> 
> So if you have any comments or suggestions, please tell me!

        I can see its usefulness for development of a family
        of some compiler-independent, light-weight utilities for
        Haskell, operating on sources of Haskell modules:
 
        + Converter from literate to non-literate source code.
          If I am not mistaken, each Haskell compiler and Hugs has
          its own version of "unlit" program. However, each
          "unlit" is compiler specific and dependent on other
          *.c and *.h files. There is nothing platform or compiler
          specific in this problem that could not be handled
          by a generic utility, running ouside any Haskell system.

        + Code and comments extractor
          A code extractor ("give me a list of default methods for class
          XXX", etc.) from Haskell sources would be a useful addition to
          any kind of a high level GUI browser. Its logic could be much
          simpler if source modules were first prefiltered by "unlit".
 
        From my utilitarian perspective, it does not matter whether
        such utilities are developed in Haskell and then compiled to C
        or in your framework of a pure C - as long as they are generic,
        lightweight and C-compilable on any platform (Unix for
        start).

        I am brewing my own code for such tasks, but I would gladly
        use somebody's expertly designed utilities instead.     
        Jan