Hi, I'm looking for a good ocaml parsing library that isn't a derivative of flex/bison. Ideally, I'd like a monadic combinator library along the lines of parsec, but I can't find anything.
I would use haskell, but making llvm bindings for haskell is proving more tiresome than I originally thought.
Cheers,
Duane
Here's one library, via Google. (Which also brought up this and this, which lists several more relevant-sounding libraries.)
When I wrote a combinator parser in ML, it turned out rather cumbersome to use because of the value restriction and eager evaluation, which forced you to eta-expand your grammar rules. Ocaml is said to be more relaxed about the value restriction, though -- maybe you'll be spared some of that pain.
In the OCaml world, stream-based parsers and Camlp4 are the next two most common alternatives. Both have been described in detail in previous OCaml Journal articles.
Monadic parser combinators are comparatively rare in OCaml, largely because there are several higher-level and vastly more efficient libraries available.