Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Parser Combinator in Java

Pffuii, I'm quite busy these days, hence the posting frequency has dropped. I'm in the process of playing with a functional Java based language (more on that in later posts, hopefully) and I decided to have a go at a little parser combinator in Java.
The end result works (I can parse things like Java class declaration) and looks a lot like parsec, but there is a lot of Java cruft that I'd like to remove, things that are hidden with the wonderful magic (I don't understand it well enough to call it otherwise) of Haskell monads.
For example:

try {
Character c=new Try(new Letter()).parse(input);
...
} catch (JCParseException jpe){
...


This code tries to match a letter in the input at its current position (the input variable) and does not consume any input if it fails. I don't like having to explicitly tell the combinator to parse the input, and I don't like using exceptions to indicate a parsing failure. Now, anybody has any great ideas?

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