[Haskell-cafe] Parsing workflow

[Nils Schweinsberg]

Hi!

I'm having a really hard time to write a correct parser for a small 
language I've developed. I have been trying to write a parser using 
parsec, but always get a lot of error messages like "unexpected "\n", 
expected ..., new-line or..." when trying to run the parser. Then I read 
about the happy parser and really liked the separation of lexing the 
text into tokens and parsing the actual logic behind those tokens. Since 
I couldn't get familiar with the lexer "alex" I gave up on the 
alex-happy-approach again and went back to parsec. But with that 
lexer->parser idea on my mind, my parser currently looks a lot like a 
lexer. So I came up with the idea of using a combination of parsec and 
happy, where I generate a list of tokens for my text via parsec and 
analyse it with happy.


My questions would be:

- Is this a valid approach?

- What is your workflow on parsing complex data structures?

- What about performance? Since my project is going to be an interpreted 
language parsing performance might be interesting aswell. I've read that 
happy is in general faster than parsec, but what if I combine both of 
them as I said above? I guess that parsing a simple list of tokens 
without any nested parser structures would be pretty fast?

- Do you have any other ideas on how to improve my parser?

- What are your general thoughts on happy vs. parsec?


Thanks for any replies,

Nils