Text.ParserCombinators.* is a bad name

Cale Gibbard cgibbard at gmail.com
Thu Mar 9 01:32:44 EST 2006


> > We wouldn't want to make name of the HughesPJ module too generic, as
> > there are also other libraries of pretty printing combinators out there,
> > such as Daan Leijen's PPrint.
>
> Yeah, that was one issue. It's not obvious to me what the alternative to
> HughesPJ would be though.
>
> -- Don

I think that in this case, it's okay, since it's not like there's just
one true parser combinator or pretty printing library out there, and
they're all for roughly the same things, they just have minor
advantages over one another. The same argument against naming it
"HughesPJ" could be levelled against "Parsec". I think it's okay as
long as the rest of the hierarchy up to that point gets across what
the library is for, and in this case, it does.

It would be nice to change ParserCombinators (which is annoyingly
long) with something like Parsers though. It's irritating to import
multiple separate modules from Parsec for that reason. You know
something is wrong when you start copying and pasting imports and then
making small modifications to each to get what you want. :) Barring
that, perhaps there should be a syntax for specifying a branch of the
tree from which you'd like to import multiple modules without having
to type out the whole path for each.

 - Cale


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