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| author | David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> | 2015-10-20 15:17:46 -0400 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> | 2015-10-20 15:17:46 -0400 |
| commit | 742a4c0b0caa6a868f0133c10c56dcf4915f0e68 (patch) | |
| tree | c656c4f933091fb76421efd02f154f6b635b2b67 | |
| parent | eeab66f5159ac0870c902f384e656c5ee934ad8c (diff) | |
README: Explain the purely functional parser combinator API.
| -rw-r--r-- | README | 13 |
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions
@@ -73,6 +73,19 @@ converted to HTML (via SXML) or any other format for rendering. highlighter is used to deal with text that doesn't match any recognized syntax and simply produces an untagged string. + Most syntax highlighters use lots of regular expressions to do their + magic, but guile-syntax-highlight uses a purely functional, monadic + parser combinator interface instead. This makes it easy for + developers to build complex parsers by creating compositions of many + simpler ones. Additionally, rather than working with raw strings or + Guile's file ports, the input code is represented as a lazy stream + of characters using the SRFI-41 streams library. By using streams, + parsers do not have to worry about things like reverting the + character index from which a file is being read upon a failure, or + any other state management. Parsers simply return the thing they + parsed, if any, and the remaining stream to be consumed by another + parser. + * Requirements - GNU Guile >= 2.0.9 |