Published on Tue, Mar 30, 2021 by doma team, working from Bristol, UK.

TL;DR

• Don’t use regular expressions for parsing
• Parser combinators are a way to construct composable computations with higher-order functions
• Parser combinators are easy to use to get results quickly
• They are sufficient for 99% of pragmatic uses, falling short only if your library’s sole purpose is parsing

Role of parsing in computing

Data processing is a pillar of computing. To run an algorithm, one must first build up some data structures in memory. The way to populate data structures is to get some raw data and load it into memory. Data scientists work…

TL;DR

Rust

• Rust is an imperative language that has the most pattern-related language facilities
• Rust has both shallow destructuring and deep destructuring
• if let matching form can be utilised to alleviate Rust’s lack of multiple-head functions

JavaScript

• JavaScript has a lot of pattern-related language features:
• Position-based destructuring for arrays and key-based for objects
• Rest parameters, destructuring support
• Shallow-copy spread operator
• With support from Microsoft, Facebook and NPM, proper pattern-matching in JS is inevitable

Python and C++

• Language support for pattern-matching included in alpha (Edit thanks to reddit).
• Supports packing/unpacking
• C++ has powerful libraries for pattern matching. Language support is likely in C++23

All the time, ideas…

From CSV to XML to JSON, humans sure love their structured data. Computers like it too. If you think about it, X86 assembly is not much more than a structured data format. So is true for ELF, dwarf, protobuf…

PNGs, JPEGs and even MySQL database files are all structured binary formats. They can get corrupted, store hidden data or you might need to simply patch something inside without pulling heavy tools to work with a particular file format.

To explore a binary file at a glance, we suggest using

1. hexdump -C to get classical side by side view of address…