alt Hacker NewsI'm not familiar with parser combinators. The parser generators that I'm familiar with (YACC, ANTLR3,5) parse a stream of lexemes/tokens, not characters. Is there a reason why combinators don't operate on lexemes?
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Jtsummers • today at 4:24 PM
They can, it's just that often people seem to use parser combinators to build both the lexer and the parser, not just the parser, which means dealing with the character stream. If you separate the two steps, parser combinators just dealing with tokens works just fine.
A parser combinator takes parsers as input and produces a new parser. The basic parsers are very simple, but they are combined together to produce more complex parsers.