[Haskell-cafe] Embarrassed Haskeller -- why is Read so bad? What are alternatives?

[Ryan Newton]

Thanks!

That looks perfect and that is exactly what my googling failed to turn up.




On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 11:49 AM, malcolm.wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com>wrote:

> The polyparse package has a complete drop-in replacement for Read, called
> Text.Parse.  Its lexer is derived closely from Haskell Prelude lex.  It
> already has instances for all of the standard datatypes, and you can use
> DrIFT to generate instances for any datatypes outside the usual Prelude
> types.  The parser is fast, lazy, and space-efficient.  It gives good error
> messages.
>
> Regards,
>     Malcolm
>
>
> On 15 Oct, 2013,at 04:01 PM, Ryan Newton <rrnewton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We have great tools for [de]serializing both to binary and to JSON
> (binary, cereal, json, aeson, etc).  But we have rather weak support for
> [de]serializing to human readable Haskell-ish external formats.
>
> Read instances are both (1) slow, because they take Strings, and (2) they
> don't allow sensible error messages!  (Historical decision choosing Maybe
> rather than Either.)
>
> Right now I'm working on a project with a Racketeer who is trying to read
> a 6000 line file as a single list data structure.  The derived Read
> instance is just telling him it won't parse, with NO error information,
> line number etc.  To someone used to Scheme readers, that's rather poor.
>
> I wish I had something better to tell him!  I am not aware of a library to
> recommend other than switching to JSON format on disk.  OR manually
> kludging together a parsing hack that, for example, puts one element of the
> list on each line and makes much smaller calls to "read".
>
> Argh!,
>   -Ryan
>
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