Hi Ozgur,
Ozgur Akgun wrote:
I can write (separately) a parser and a pretty-printer [...]
Is there any work to combine the two?
Brent Yorgey wrote:
Maybe take a look at "Invertible Syntax Descriptions: Unifying Parsing
and Pretty Printing" by Tillmann Rendel and Klaus Ostermann from last
year's Haskell Symposium:
http://www.informatik.uni-marburg.de/~rendel/unparse/
It's a beautiful paper, and perhaps the code will work for you
(although it's too bad it's not on Hackage).
Indeed, I started this project for exactly the reason Ozgur describes: I
needed to duplicate a lot of information between parsers and pretty
printers and was annoyed about it. With invertible syntax descriptions,
I now write a single program, which looks like a combinator parser
(think "Parsec"), but can work as a pretty printer, too.
I just uploaded the code from the paper (and some additional
combinators) to Hackage:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/partial-isomorphisms
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/invertible-syntax
I use this code for the implementation of some very small languages
(think "lambda calculus"). This works fine.
I haven't really tried it for larger languages, but we have two students
here in Marburg implementing a parser for Java using the library, so we
are going to have experience with larger languages in a few weeks
(months?).
If you give it a try, I would be happy to receive success stories, bug
reports, patches, feature requests etc. I want to keep working on this,
and I am open for suggestions.
Tillmann
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