Haskell - How to best to represent a programming language's grammar?

Question

I\'ve been looking at Haskell and I\'d quite like to write a compiler in it (as a learning exercise), since a lot of its innate features can be readily applied to a compiler (pa

Answer 1

You represent programs using mutually recursive algebraic data types, and to parse programs you use parsing combinators. There are a million flavors; you will find three helpful tutorial papers on the schedule for my class for Monday, March 23, 2009. They are

• Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer, Functional Pearl: Monadic parsing in Haskell (1998)
• Graham Hutton, Higher-order Functions for Parsing (1992)
• Jeroen Fokker, Functional Parsers (1995)

The Hutton and Meijer paper is the shortest and simplest, but it uses monads, which are not obvious to the amateur. However they have a very nice grammar of and parser for expressions. If you don't grok monads yet, Fokker's tutorial is the one.