On 2/13/13 11:32 AM, Nicolas Bock wrote:
Since I have very little experience with Haskell and am not used to Haskell-think yet, I don't quite understand your statement that regexes are seen as foreign to Haskell-think. Could you elaborate? What would a more "native" solution look like? From what I have learned so far, it seems to me that Haskell is a lot about clear, concise, and well structured code. I find regexes extremely compact and powerful, allowing for very concise code, which should fit the bill perfectly, or shouldn't it?
Regexes are powerful and concise for recognizing regular languages. They are not, however, very good for *parsing* regular languages; nor can they handle non-regular languages (unless you're relying on the badness of pcre). In other languages people press regexes into service for parsing because the alternative is using an external DSL like lex/yacc, javaCC, etc. Whereas, in Haskell, we have powerful and concise tools for parsing context-free languages and beyond (e.g., parsec, attoparsec).
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