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Re:PEG Parsers by pacaro on Monday July 22, 2019 @07:29PM (#20503245)
One thing that I like about PEG (among many) is that it's fairly easy to create useful error messages from them.

My approach has been to introduce a type of cut operator, such that if you backtrack past a cut operator then it's information is stored, then if the parsee can't proceed it can examine the stored errors and produce hopefully sensible error messages.

For example, if I have a simple rule for an expression

  exp = atom (op exp)*
And I insert a cut between the op and the atom...

  exp = atom (op <cut> exp)*
Then that cut (which can be appropriately annotated with human readable error information) will be returned if there is a binary exp with no rhs
Re:PEG Parsers by aidenn0 on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @01:18AM (#20504583)
Any suggestions for discriminating between a partial parse and an error parse? For example a REPL in which on newline if the parse can never be correct versus a parse that could be made correct with more input.
Re:PEG Parsers by victorNicollet on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @03:50AM (#20505153)
This has always struck me as significant effort invested in making a bad user experience only slight less bad: the REPL overloads the meaning of "enter" to mean both "insert a new line" and "execute command", and then attempts to guess what the user meant by tweaking the grammar of the language. Why not distinguish between "insert a new line" and "execute command" as two distinct inputs, and eliminate all ambiguity ?
Re:PEG Parsers by pacaro on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @11:35AM (#20507559)
I haven't used it for that, but I have used it to absorb errors and continue. The error just gets placed into the AST and then a later phase can report on (potentially) many errors, rather than just stopping at the first. YMMV
Re:PEG Parsers by colanderman on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @12:09AM (#20504328)
I used this exact same technique for the most recent PEG-based parser I wrote too. Works really well, and integrates well with Prolog (which I was using).
Re:PEG Parsers by mamcx on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @12:47AM (#20504452)
Wait... what is a "cut"? A minimal sample that show how it help with the error messages?
Re:PEG Parsers by drothlis on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @06:39AM (#20505713)
Cut means "if you matched this far, don't consider other options even if the current option fails to parse".

With this grammar:

    expr: expr '+' term | term
And this input:

    5 +
It will first consider the first alternative (expr '+' term) but will fail to match that branch because it's missing the "term" after the "+". That's fine because there's another alternative to try (term). That alternative doesn't match either, and you'll get the error message from the last alternative that it tried (probably something like "unexpected +").

But with this grammar:

    expr: expr '+' <cut> term | term
Then with the same input ("5 +") it will consider the first alternative, fail to match, and then fail immediately with the error message from that first alternative (something like "missing term after +").
Re:PEG Parsers by mamcx on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:01AM (#20515924)
yeah, I get the purposed point of a "cut" but how I put one? Exist a basic sample? (ie: Using a peg parser how define what is a "cut"???)

    expr: expr '+' API_call_here? term | term
Re:PEG Parsers by pacaro on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @01:00PM (#20517174)
Hmm, if you're using a peg parser that doesn't directly support this you can emulate it by choosing between the rhs of the cut and a production that will always match

so

  expr : atom (op <cut> expr)*
Would be replaced with

  expr : atom (op (expr / cut))*
  cut  : "XXX"?
or perhaps simpler

  expr : atom (op expr?)*
Either way when you process the expr rule there will be an empty match where the rhs should be, and an appropriate error can be generated
Re:PEG Parsers by pacaro on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @11:32AM (#20507545)
Drothlis comment describes it well, but to perhaps explain where the term comes from, Prolog has a related concept and calls it the cut operator