[erlang-questions] Question in Parser Implementation

[黃耀賢 (Yau-Hsien Huang)]

Hey, guys. I tried implementing parsers guided by
Graham Hutton's paper: Higher-order Functions For Parsing.
( http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#parsing )
Part code is listed below.

-module(parser).
-compile(export_all).

succeed(V, Inp) ->
    [{V, Inp}].

fail(_) ->
    [].

satisfy(_, []) ->
    fail([]);
satisfy(P, [X|Xs]) ->
    case erlang:apply(P, [X]) of
true ->
    succeed(X, Xs);
false ->
    fail(Xs)
    end.

literal(X, Inp) ->
    satisfy(fun(Y) -> X == Y end, Inp).

literal(X) ->
    fun(Inp) ->
    erlang:apply(?MODULE, literal, [X, Inp])
    end.

alt(P1, P2, Inp) ->
    erlang:apply(P1, [Inp]) ++ erlang:apply(P2, [Inp]).

The alt/3 is an implementation of alternation syntax (`` | '') in BNF,
that alt/3 takes two parsers and applies each to the input string.
Then I tested it using a query

    parser:alt(parser:fail, parser:literal($3), "345").

and found that it does not accept the syntax 'parser:fail' for
representing a function. The erl reports "Illegal expression" for
the query.

How to take a function name and apply anywhere?
Need the function `fail' be defined as a lambda function like

    fail() -> fun(Inp) -> [] end.

?

Best Regards.