[Haskell-cafe] Two questions regarding Alex/Parsec

[Don Stewart]

nielsadb:
> On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 14:08 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
> 
> > Just a quick question, did you try using the pandoc markdown parser?
> > 
> >     http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pandoc/0.46/doc/html/Text-Pandoc-Readers-Markdown.html
> > 
> > It'd be useful to know if that was enough for printing and generation
> > of wiki content. Though being GPLd, it'd also be nice to have a BSD-ish
> > licensed wiki parser/pretty printer.
> 
> No, I did not. In fact I didn't know about this project, but it looks
> very interesting. I'll definitely go and look at the code.
  
> One of the reasons I started worked on a MediaWikiParser was because I
> wanted to use the Haskell language and some of its tools rather than just
> read about them. I'm not really interested in making a clone of something
> that already exists just for the sake of ideology (although personally
> I'm much more fond of BSD-style licenses than of GPL).

Personally, I'd find a MediaWiki parser/pretty printer quite useful!
  
> On a side note: are there any lexer/parser generators out there I should
> be aware of? As mentioned in my original post I've tried using Happy, but
> I was unable to understand its very concise error message 'parE'.
> It would be really nice to have a tool that generates an AST automatically
> (e.g. something like ANTLR).

There's lots, but probably Alex (lexer) and Happy (parser) or Parsec are
the most widely used.

-- Don