j-mie6 / parsley

A fast and modern parser combinator library for Scala
https://j-mie6.github.io/parsley/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
175 stars 15 forks source link

Generalising `many` and `some` #141

Open j-mie6 opened 1 year ago

j-mie6 commented 1 year ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. As of parsley 4.0.0, many and some can be used to parse zero/one or more values into a List. This works pretty well, but occasionally, it is desirable to parse it into a different type, Vector or Array, say. In this sense, many and some are a bit wasteful.

Describe the solution you'd like It might be nice to explore generalising these combinators to take in an implicit instance of a typeclass that helps build various collections, and use this internally. The low-priority implicits pattern could be used to ensure that List is chosen above other alternatives, say.

The cleanest way of doing this would be to support HKTs, so many[A, F[_]](p: Parsley[A])(...): Parsley[F[A]]), allowing for something like many[Char, Vector](p): Parsley[Vector[Char]], but this rules out three useful use cases: chars into strings, ints into strings, and (k, v) pairs into Maps. Annoyingly this means we'd be looking at many[A, C](p: Parsley[A])(...): Parsley[C], which places extra burden on implicit resolution to tie the knot, and more verbose type ascription when it goes wrong (i.e. many[A, Vector[A]]).

In any case, it's a bit annoying to have two parameters there, the A and the C/C[_]. Perhaps it's time to move many and some to be methods on Parsley itself? This would allow for p.many[Vector]/p.many[Vector[A]] which feels like an improvement. That said, perhaps it could be done via extension methods, and have two different kinds, one for HKTs and the other for everything more general?

Describe alternatives you've considered Obviously, constructing stuff like Vector or Map, can be be using .foldRight or .foldLeft, but this doesn't leverage mutable builders. The use of mutable builders makes this pattern of use far more clumsy than it needs to be. The existence of stringOfMany and stringOfSome further points to this, and their implementations are non-trivial without the secret internal combinators within parsley: they are desirable though!

Additional Context If we go down this route, we should be careful to explore the performance implications of "de-optimising" the existing many implementation.

j-mie6 commented 1 year ago

Whatever we come up with here should ideally be applied to stuff like sepBy and sepEndBy etc (unless we go the method route for better inference...?)

j-mie6 commented 9 months ago

Turns out, following the Scala 2.13+ way of using Factory, we can actually do this in minor. Most of the groundwork has been laid now, just need to expose an API