Separation of Parsing and Lexing

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Overview

In many cases it is appropriate to separate parsing and lexing. A lexer breaks up the input stream into tokens like identifiers, parentheses, numbers, strings etc. Furthermore usually the lexer strips off whitespace. The parser handles the grammar of the language by using the tokens as primitives.

This approach has several advantages:

• For a real language the complexity of parsing a source file is separated into two managable sized parts.

• Handling whitespace in the parser makes the parser unnecessarily complex.

• As soon as a language has identifiers and keywords where the keywords look syntactically like identifiers, a parser handling characters directly requires a lot of backtracking which makes the parser inefficient. A lexer can recognize identifiers and after successful recognition of an identifier it checks by using an efficient lookup table if the identifier is a keyword.

However many combinator libraries do not offer the possibility to split up the parsing task into a lexer and a parser. `Fmlib_parse` supports the splitting up of lexing and parsing with a lot of functionality.

How to write a lexer

A lexer analyzes the input stream consisting of characters in the following way:

    WS Token WS Token WS .... WS EOF

where WS is a possibly empty sequence of whitespace like blanks, tabs, newlines, comments etc. Token is a lexically correct token. EOF represents the end of the input stream.

Since the lexer has to succeed immediately after recognizing a syntactically correct token it is not a normal parser which succeeds only after having seen the end of input. Therefore a lexer is a partial parser. After having successfully recognized a token the lexer must be restartable to recognize the next token or to recognize the end of input.

The easiest way to write a lexer with the help of Fmlib_parse is to use Fmlib_parse.Character by doing the following steps:

• Define a module Token and Token_plus of the following form:

  module Token = struct
      type t =
          T1 of ...
          T2 of ...
          ...
          End (* end of input *)
      ...
  end
  
  module Token_plus = struct
      type t = Position.range * Token
  end

• Write a combinator whitespace which recogizes zero or more occurrences of whitespace. The definition of whitespace depends on the language.

• Write a combinator for each token which recognizes the token e.g. tok1, tok2, ...

• Use Fmlib_parse.Character.Make.lexer with the definition

  let token: Token_plus.t t =
      lexer
          whitespace
          Token.End
          (
              tok1 </> tok2 </> tok3 </> ...
          )

  to have a combinator which recognizes tokens and strips off whitespace.

• Use Fmlib_parse.Character.Make.make_partial and Fmlib_parse.Character.Make.restart_partial to make the lexer satisfying the interface Fmlib_parse.Interfaces.LEXER

Look into https://github.com/hbr/fmlib/blob/master/src/parse/test_json.ml to see an example with a simple json parser on how it works.

How to write a parser

Write the parser using Fmlib_parse.Token_parser to write the parser which uses Token.t as the primitive tokens. Look into the same example as above.

How to wire the lexer and the parser

Use Fmlib_parse.Parse_with_lexer to generate the final parser which scans a stream of characters breaks the input up into tokens by using the lexer and analyzes the grammar by using the token parser. See same example as above.

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