A Functional-Logic Perspective of Parsing.

Parsing has been a traditional workbench for showing the virtues of declarative programming. Both logic and functional programming claim the ability of writing parsers in a natural and concise way. We address here the task from a functional-logic perspective. By modelling parsers as non-deterministic functions we achieve a very natural manner of building parsers, which combines the nicest properties of the functional and logic approaches. In particular, we are able to define parsers within our framework in a style very close to that of functional programming parsers, but using simpler concepts. Moreover, we have moved beyond usual declarative approaches to parsers, since the functional-logic parsers presented here can be considered as truly data values. As an example of this feature we define a function that detects ambiguous grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]