[Haskell-cafe] Parsec on TeX

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 May 5, at 0:14, Ross Boylan wrote:

> So the example is wrong?  What inference should I draw about the state
> of Parsec and its documentation?  I was thinking of trying Frost et  
> al's
> X-SAIGA, but that the better documentation for parsec would be a plus.

The original documentation which you will probably find via Google is  
several years out of date; unfortunately, nobody has updated it and  
the newer API documentation lacks most of the actual details of how to  
*use* Parsec --- so really you need to have daan's Parsec paper and  
the Haskell library API documentation ( http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/parsec/Text-ParserCombinators-Parsec.html 
  ) open at the same time to see how things have changed.

I will note that a newer version of Parsec is in development; I am  
hoping it will have somewhat better documentation (preferably an  
updated version of the original Parsec paper).

> I had thought HUGS made more sense for fiddling around, but it seems  
> all
> I'm doing is loading files anyway.  What is the style people use for
> this exploratory work?  I've already installed haskell-mode for emacs
> and ghc6, but it's not clear to me to what extent the former servers  
> as
> a development environment rather than just a language formatter.


ghci (the interpreter component of GHC) works much like hugs but is  
much more up to date; there are a number of useful libraries which  
either haven't been ported to or simply don't work with Hugs.  (The  
new Parsec is one of these, as it works with the ByteString library  
(much faster than standard Strings, which are naive linked lists of  
characters); ByteString really needs to be compiled and Hugs is only  
an interpreter.)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH