[Haskell-cafe] Techniques for ensuring parser correctness?

[S. Doaitse Swierstra]

I took a quick look at this file. To me it seems a mixture of a lexer and a parser built on top of a home brewn parser library. I see function like maybeWork which 
(if I interpret correctly) test whether specific conditions hold for the input, etc.

Indeed it would be nice to have a grammatical description of the input format. An important question is whether you can be assured that all input is indeed correct, or whether any checking has to be done.

 Doaitse


On 26 jul 2010, at 12:38, Eric Kow wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 03:01:54 +0000, Jason Dagit wrote:
>> I think the grammar is fairly simple, although I'm not confident classifying
>> it.  I know it can be parsed with just a simple pass over the data.  The
>> only uses of backtracking are just to figure out what is next, like a peek
>> at the next token.  Let me give you some samples of what the input looks
>> like.
> 
> For the interested, I think you can view
> 
> http://darcs.net/src/Darcs/Patch/Read.hs
> 
> or better yet darcs get --lazy http://darcs.net
> 
>> Here are three entries from the "inventory" they correspond to PatchInfos:
>> [TAG 2.4
>> Reinier Lamers <tux_rocker at reinier.de>**20100226180900
>> Ignore-this: 36ce0456c214345f55a7bc5fc142e985
>> ]
> 
> If it turns out to be a sufficiently low-powered grammar, we should
> probably write it up formally and stick it in the source code for
> documentation.
> 
> Eric
> 
> PS. We've been making little bits of progress trying to document Darcs
>    on a technical high level, eg.
> 
>    - http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsInternals/Record
>    - http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsInternals/CacheSystem
> 
>    Such a grammar would be a nice addition to the
>    good-enough-that-you-could-rewrite-Darcs-in-Fortran aspiration.
> 
> -- 
> Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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