rwillians
I’ve recently used NimbleParsec for parsing a programming language for a game/challenge, just for fun. It might not have been the best solution, but it was pretty good at getting the job done!
That got me wondering if anyone else has used NimbleParsec for parsing a programming language. And if so, how did you handle pretty-printing parsing errors? (I didn’t handle at all haha)
I’d love to see some examples to learn from them – and perhaps even add some examples to the lib’s documentation.
Also, if you know a more adequate lexer/parser for parsing programming langs in Elixir, please do let me know. I’d love some recommendations.
Where Next?
Trending in Discussions
Other Trending Topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Producing high quality Elixir screencasts since 2017.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #library
- #deployment
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #elixirconf
- #channels
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #podcasts
- #javascript
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #elixirconf-us
- #ai
- #blog-post
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #api
- #forms
- #hex
- #security
- #metaprogramming
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Error tracking, logs, uptime, and Just Enough APM. Built for developers.
Elixir, Erlang & BEAM conferences from Code Sync - join us in 2026!
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
**Building the future of software with AI, trust, and human connection.**
The deployment platform built for Elixir: PaaS ease, VPS control.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Showing Posts 1 to 5- Show Best Posts
- Show All (oldest first)
- Show All (newest first)
D4no0
Now try and use lex/yacc from OTP, and you can write your own programming language that runs on OTP
kreiling.io
I haven’t used it for parsing an existing language but I’ve used it to parse DSLs. For example, I wrote a schema-less JSON document API on top of Elasticsearch and wrote a query language using NimbleParsec.
Can you provide any more detail about what you mean by pretty-printing exactly? I’ll provide some personal experience here though: I’ve found piping the result of
NimbleParsec.wrap_and_tag/3to theNimbleParsec.label/3function is really useful for improving error messages. In combination with the line+column integers in the error tuple returned bydefparsec-defined functions, I’ve managed to produce concise, easy-to-debug error messagesrwillians
Hey @kreiling.io
I’m unable to upload images, but here’s the link to screen shot of a “pretty-printed” error message Screenshot-2023-09-14-at-18-07-34 hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB
I think “prettry-print” wasn’t my best choice of wording there, I meant more like being able to provide fine grained error messages as one would expect from a compiler’s parser. using
label/3didn’t seem much helpful there (probably mb for misusing it).In case it interests you, here’s the repo I’m working on: GitHub - rwillians/rinha-de-compilers--elixir-transcompiler: Source-to-Source Transcompiler from `.rinha` to Elixir. Runs on ERTS (Erlang Runtime System). · GitHub
It’s a “source-to-source transcompiler” (fancy wording – I’m parsing from another lang, transpiling the ast to elixir then compiling). It’s just for fun, for a challenge.
rwillians
Nice! I wasn’t aware of those, I’ll look into it.
Thanks!
dimitarvp
To slightly correct @D4no0 it’s
leexandyecc.