[erlang-questions] Parsing C with leex and yecc

[French, Mike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: erlang-questions@REDACTED 
> [mailto:erlang-questions@REDACTED]On
> Behalf Of French, Mike
> Sent: 21 July 2010 09:22
> To: 'Joe Armstrong'; Tony Arcieri
> Cc: Erlang
> Subject: RE: [erlang-questions] Parsing C with leex and yecc
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: erlang-questions@REDACTED 
> > [mailto:erlang-questions@REDACTED]On
> > Behalf Of Joe Armstrong
> > Sent: 20 July 2010 19:40
> > To: Tony Arcieri
> > Cc: Erlang
> > Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] Parsing C with leex and yecc
> ...
> > Yes - I've also been playing with my own peg combinator library :-).
> > The problem is that LALR(1) parsers can give you pretty good automatic
error
> > diagnostics on faulty input. Peg grammars just fail - period - and you
> > have to write your own error recovery in the grammar ...
> 
> I think PEGs can be written to handle errors elegantly.
> Each combinator applies an exploration strategy to the input top-down,
> and passes the remaining input on to subsequent analysis steps.
> When an error occurs, it should pass back the reason for the failure.
> Each error ultimately originates from a failed character lexing rule.
> 
> Just as input is reduced by moving forwards, so errors are accumulated 
> flowing backwards. Each combinator is then responsible for merging the 
> error reports coming back into it. The error handling process is in 
> some sense dual to the original input processing, so in some sense, 
> each parser combinator must contain an error co-combinator.

This duality becomes clearer with a slight change of terminology.
It's not really an 'error' until all rules have not matched.
So if you replace 'parser' with 'match' and 'error' with 'non-match', then:

  "Each match combinator must contain a non-match co-combinator".

Mike


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