[Haskell-cafe] Parsing in Practice

[Tom Hawkins]

I am writing a parser for a big, ugly, standard language and I need to 
decide between using either Happy or Parsec.

I currently have a priliminary LALR(1) grammar, so a port to Happy would 
be relatively easy.  But, I'm wondering if life would be easier if I 
chose Parsec's combinator parsing instead.  It's error reporting seems 
to be top notch and it's "optional", "many", and "sepBy1" combinators 
are very elegant.

However, I have a few concerns with Parsec.  First is performance; what 
factor of slow-down should I expect?  Second is bug prevention.  I don't 
have much experience writing LL(n) grammars, so how easy is it to 
introduce bugs in a Parsec grammar?  Even though I hate debugging 
LALR(1) parsing ambiguities, it prevents problems.

Also, it appears the GHC developers chose Happy for Haskell.  What was 
their rational?

Thanks for your recommendations, one way or another.

-Tom