Tim Attwood wrote:
> Interesting, maybe you should clean it up and publish it under your
> real name, maybe somewhere like the Monad.Reader or some such.
> It certainly wouldn't hurt to share some of your technical musings with
> a larger audience of  functional programmers.

Well, that's vaguely my idea. It's part of a sequence of "portfolio" 
documents I'm writing, in case I need to show somebody some day what my 
writing skills are like. (Most of my documents never get finished. 
Except the ones at work - which, obviously, I can't show to anybody.)

I think the Monad.Reader would be the wrong place though; combinator 
libraries ARE very well known within the FP community. It's the people 
outside that it's going to be new to. (I'm not sure where *would* be an 
appropriate place to publish it though.)

> In general I prefer a top down approach to learning, but the
> bottom up pattern you are following is frequently used in
> academia.

I'm not even sure how you'd explain Parsec from the top down. The whole 
design of the system is that you build parsers in a bottom-up style, so 
that seems a logical way to describe it.

> Maybe you should mention buildExpressionParser
> and makeTokenParser?

I already mentioned buildExpressionParser. (Top of page 9.) I merely 
didn't refer to it by name.

The aim of the document is not to be a reference manual for Parsec (I 
mean, I've changed all the function names and the entire syntax for 
starters!), but to give OOP enthusiasts a taste of how Parsec does 
things. Knowing that you can feed a datastructure into a library 
function and have it construct your parser for you is sufficient, IMHO.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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