Paper accepted at OOPSLA
Our paper “Parsing with First-Class Derivatives” (
Jonathan Brachthäuser
AlumniJonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser, 
Tillmann Rendel
AlumniTillmann Rendel and 
HeadKlaus Ostermann ) has been accepted for
presentation at the annual conference of Object-oriented Programming, Systems,
Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA).
Abstract
Brzozowski derivatives, well known in the context of regular expressions, have recently been rediscovered to give a simplified explanation to parsers of context-free languages. We add derivatives as a novel first-class feature to a standard parser combinator language. First class derivatives enable an inversion of the control flow, allowing to implement modular parsers for languages that previously required separate preprocessing steps or cross-cutting modifications of the parsers. We show that our framework offers new opportunities for reuse and supports a modular definition of interesting use cases of layout-sensitive parsing.