[Haskell-cafe] What *is* a DSL?

[Robert Atkey]

On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 13:28 +0100, Nils Anders Danielsson wrote:
> On 2009-10-07 17:29, Robert Atkey wrote:
> > A deep embedding of a parsing DSL (really a context-sensitive grammar
> > DSL) would look something like the following. I think I saw something
> > like this in the Agda2 code somewhere, but I stumbled across it when I
> > was trying to work out what "free" applicative functors were.
> 
> The Agda code you saw may have been due to Ulf Norell and me. There is a
> note about it on my web page:
> 
>   http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nad/publications/danielsson-norell-parser-combinators.html

Yes, it might have been that, OTOH I'm sure I saw it in some Haskell
code. Maybe I was imagining it.

> > Note that these grammars are strictly less powerful than the ones that
> > can be expressed using Parsec because we only have a fixed range of
> > possibilities for each rule, rather than allowing previously parsed
> > input to determine what the parser will accept in the future.
> 
> Previously parsed input /can/ determine what the parser will accept in
> the future (as pointed out by Peter Ljunglöf in his licentiate thesis).
> Consider the following grammar for the context-sensitive language
> {aⁿbⁿcⁿ| n ∈ ℕ}:

Yes, sorry, I was sloppy in what I said there. Do you know of a
characterisation of what languages having a possibly infinite amount of
nonterminals gives you. Is it all context-sensitive languages or a
subset?

> > And a general definition for parsing single-digit numbers. This works
> > for any set of non-terminals, so it is a reusable component that works
> > for any grammar:
> 
> Things become more complicated if the reusable component is defined
> using non-terminals which take rules (defined using an arbitrary
> non-terminal type) as arguments. Exercise: Define a reusable variant of
> the Kleene star, without using grammars of infinite depth.

I see that you have an answer in the paper you linked to above. Another
possible answer is to consider open sets of rules in a grammar:

> data OpenRuleSet inp exp =
>    forall hidden. OpenRuleSet (forall a. (exp :+: hidden) a -> 
>                                    Rule (exp :+: hidden :+: inp) a)

> data (f :+: g) a = Left2 (f a) | Right2 (g a)

So OpenRuleSet inp exp, exports definitions of the nonterminals in
'exp', imports definitions of nonterminals in 'inp' (and has a
collection of hidden nonterminals).

It is then possible to combine them with a function of type:

> combineG :: (inp1 :=> exp1 :+: inp) ->
>             (inp2 :=> exp2 :+: inp) ->
>             OpenRuleSet inp1 exp1 ->
>             OpenRuleSet inp2 exp2 ->
>             OpenRuleSet inp (exp1 :+: exp2)

One can then give a reusable Kleene star by stating it as an open rule
set:

> star :: forall a nt. Rule nt a -> OpenRuleSet nt (Equal [a])

where Equal is the usual equality GADT.

Obviously, this would be a bit clunky to use in practice, but maybe more
specialised versions combineG could be given.

Bob


-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.