Bodil dot lol : Learning Parser Combinators With Rust

BRANK

18 Apr 2019This article teaches the fundamentals of parser combinators to people who are already Rust programmers. It assumes no other knowledge, and will explain everything that isn't directly related to Rust, as well as a few of the more unexpected aspects of using Rust for this purpose. It will not teach you Rust if you don't already know it, and, if so, it probably also won't teach you parser combinators very well. If you would like to learn Rust, I recommend the book The Rust Programming Language.Beginner's Mind #There comes a point in the life of every programmer when they find themselves in need of a parser.The novice programmer will ask, "what is a parser?"The intermediate programmer will say, "that's easy, I'll write a regular expression."The master programmer will say, "stand back, I know lex and yacc."The novice has the right idea.Not that regular expressions aren't great. (But please don't try writing a complicated parser as a regular expression.) Not that there's no joy t…