Our founder Stefan Richter organizes the first Live Coding Meetup in Hamburg. On May 9, 2016, we will start off the Meetup with parser combinators in Haskell. Alex Biehl is going to present the basic concept and use of parser combinators and interactively build a JSON parser and develop a personal parser combinators library on the beamer. Parsers are used almost everywhere: HTML pages in browsers, JSON, or other small, self-defined format, which need to be assembled logically for processing, in order to be mapped onto data structures. Should a library - that gets the job done - not exist, the developer must build a parser manually. The effort to use established tools such as Yacc or ANTLR is fairly high, which is why it is sometimes obvious to use the quick and dirty solution via string operation and/or standard term. In short, both comprehensibility and maintainability suffer immensely. Parser combinators are a great answer: They allow construction of complicated parsers through the combination of small, simple parsers.

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