[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Parsec] No identEnd in ParsecToken?

[Jón Fairbairn]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> writes:

> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 04:17:41PM +0200,
>  Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote 
>  a message of 25 lines which said:
> 
> > I'm trying to use Parsec for a language which have identifiers where
> > the '-' character is allowed only inside identifiers, not at the
> > start or the end.

I'm not really familiar with Parsec (I wrote my own limited
backtrack parser years ago, and haven't quite got round to
updating my brain), and while (judging by threads like this
one) it seems to be harder to use than one would hope, this
particular problem doesn't look as hard to me as all that.

> [My grammar was underspecified, I also want to disallow two
> consecutive dashes.]

[...]

> Here is my final version (rewritten in my style, errors are mine and
> not Udo's), thanks again:
> 
> inner_minus = do
>                 char '-'
>                 lookAhead alphaNum
>                 return '-'
>
> identifier = do
>         start <- letter
>         rest <- many (alphaNum <|> try inner_minus)
>         return (start:rest)
>    <?> "identifier"


I'd have thought something like the following was the
'obvious' way of doing it:

chThen c r = do a <- c; as <- r; return (a:as)
identifier = do
        start <- letter `chThen` many alphaNum;
        rest <- many (char '-' `chThen` many1 alphaNum) 
        return (start++concat rest)
   <?> "identifier"

ie, your identifiers are an initial sequence of non-minuses
beginning with a letter, and then an optional sequence of
non-minuses preceded by a minus. Or have I lost the plot
somewhere?

Aside: 
Is there already name for `chThen`? ie (liftM2 (:)); I had a
feeling we were avoiding liftM & friends for some reason.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html  (updated 2006-07-14)