🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bx923M.K82@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk> jl@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (John Launchbury) writes:
   I am amazed that after more than half a dozen articles on functional
   parsers that no-one has referred to the literature.

I think the literature is, on the whole, covered in the references of
the papers that have been mentioned in the articles.  For example, I
reference Burge in my (incomplete) paper since it mentions the use of
continuations (which IMHO is the interesting part :-) and if I ever
finish the paper, I'll also include a reference to Lloyd Allison's
paper.  If and when I cover building the AST and/or dealing with
ambiguous grammars, the following will also be referenced :-

@inproceedings
{ Koster75
, author=    {C. H. A. Koster}
, title=     {A technique for parsing ambiguous grammars}
, booktitle= {Jahrestagung}
, year=      {1975}
, editor=    {D. Siefkes}
, pages=     {233--246}
, publisher= SpringerVerlag
, note=      {LNCS 26}
}

which covers much of the work (under in the form of affix grammars)
which has been subsequently rediscovered in the functional language
area.  If one wishes to push further back, higher order functional
parsers bear a striking similarity with van Wijngaarden grammars; just
replace the higher order combining forms (seq, alt ... etc.) with
meta-rules in a van Wijngaarden grammar.  This fact has not be lost
on others, and one went so far as to get a Ph.D on the subject.
(actually the thesis goes the other way, it replaces meta-rules with
HOF ... etc.)

@phdthesis
{ Edupuganty87
, author= {Balanjaninath Edupuganty}
, title=  {Two Level Grammars: An implementable metalanguage for
           consistent and complementary language specifications} 
, school= {University of Alabama in Birmingham}
, year=   {1987}
}

So to sum up: functional parsing is a simple idea, it has been
independently invented many times and will probably be re-invented
many times in the future.

bevan