[Haskell-cafe] Parsing workflow

[Malcolm Wallace]

> - Is this a valid approach?

It is possible that your Parsec lexer will need to see the entire  
input before it delivers any tokens at all to the Happy parser.  This  
might cause a space problem, depending on how large your inputs are  
likely to be.

> - What is your workflow on parsing complex data structures?

I usually write a lexer by hand, as a little state machine delivering  
a lazy list of tokens, then pass the tokens as the input to a grammar  
built from parser combinators.  For larger inputs, I use lazy parser  
combinators to avoid space leaks.

> - 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?

Parser combinators are rarely a performance bottleneck in my  
experience.  However, relying on parser combinators to do lexing often  
slows things down too much (too much back-tracking).

Regards,
     Malcolm