TLDR: If you want to parse function application f a b correctly, you need to, counter-intuitively, give some precedence to tokens such as LPAREN , VAR , NUM , LAMBDA , etc.

I promised this post two posts ago, but it’s this time of the year where our students need it, so here comes!

The rest of this post is somewhat generic in what parser generator in the yacc family you use, for instance, OCaml’s menhir and Haskell’s happy .

As I mentioned in the earlier post, there are two ways to deal with precedence when building parser generators. I called them the “stratified grammar” and the “parser directives” approaches.

When showing toy programs, both methods work pretty well. But in my opinion, the “parser directives” approach is much better, as it keeps the grammar easy to read and separates the concerns of precedence and associativity. But when comes the time to implement a language with token-less function application, things become weird:

expr : | VAR { ... } | expr expr { ... }

This will parse a b c as a (b c) , contrary to the wanted (a b) c . Now if you try to find a solution to this online, you might find people discouraging you from using the “parser directives” approach, or wrong answers to beginners, or non-solutions.

Most answers usually tell you to add a ghost %token APP , and to add %prec APP to the production expr expr . Often, they will suggest to add a %left APP line to the precedence list, which is useless by itself, and also misleading. This is all on the right way to the correct solution, but not enough.

The correct solution

Unfortunately, to find the correct solution, I had to read the documentation carefully, and understand some low-level details of the implementation.

If you do so, you will learn that shift-reduce conflicts are resolved by comparing the declared precedence of the token to be shifted with the declared precedence of the production rule to be reduced. It is not really mentioned in the documentation, but in the absence of declaring a token’s precedence, they will have maximum precedence. You will also learn that a rule’s precedence is that of its rightmost non-terminal.

Therefore when presented with the shift-reduce conflict:

expr expr . VAR

The parser will compare the declared precedence of token VAR with the declared precedence of the application rule, which the %prec APP phrase lets you override to be that of the ghost token APP .

So if you never declared a precedence for VAR or made it higher than that of APP , the parser will not do what you want.

So the correct solution is the following:

% token APP LPAREN RPAREN VAR % nonassoc VAR LPAREN /* list ALL other tokens that start an expr */ % nonassoc APP /* /! \ if you write % left APP , it will NOT make the rule left - associative */ expr : | VAR { ... } | LPAREN expr RPAREN { ... } | expr expr % prec APP { ... }

It is pointless to write %left APP (instead of %nonassoc APP ), as the left is only used to resolve a conflict between a token (or set of tokens at the same precedence level) and itself (themselves), as in:

expr PLUS expr . PLUS VAR

where the PLUS token is in shift-reduce conflict with itself, in which case %left means “reduce” and %right means “shift”. But we know there will NEVER be a conflict like:

expr APP expr . APP VAR

since APP is a ghost token! So %nonassoc APP is enough, and will not mislead people into thinking that this annotation decides the associativity of the function application rule.

Now, the reason why you have to list all the other tokens, is that there will be one shift-reduce conflict per token appearing at the start of an expr . For instance, if you only have the partial solution:

% token APP LPAREN RPAREN VAR % nonassoc APP % nonassoc VAR expr : | VAR { ... } | LPAREN expr RPAREN { ... } | expr expr % prec APP { ... }

Then a b c will correctly parse to (a b) c , but a b (c d) will incorrectly parse to a (b (c d)) , because in the following shift-reduce conflict:

expr expr . LPAREN VAR VAR RPAREN

the parser had to choose between the precedence of the application rule APP , and the precedence of the incoming token LPAREN . Since you never declared it, it had higher precedence.

That’s it for parsing function application!

EDIT: To be clear, you might also have tokens that need to be at higher precedence than APP . For instance, if you want f a -> b to parse as (f a) -> b rather than f (a -> b) , you will want:

% nonassoc LPAREN VAR /* etc . */ % nonassoc APP % left ARROW

Those tokens should not be valid start tokens for an expression.

One caveat of the “parser directives” approach

Even though I advocate strongly for the “parser directives” approach, it still has one issue that prevents us from being as modular as we’d hope. Consider the following:

expr : | expr PLUS expr { Binop ( Plus , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } | expr MINUS expr { Binop ( Minus , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } | expr TIMES expr { Binop ( Times , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } | expr DIV expr { Binop ( Div , $ 1 , $ 3 ) }

A functional programmer would see this repetition, and want to abstract this away into a new non-terminal:

expr : | expr binop expr { Binop ( $ 2 , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } binop : | PLUS { Plus } | MINUS { Minus } | TIMES { Times } | DIV { Div }

This looks really cool! Unfortunately, this breaks our parser. The reason is that, earlier, each rule had its own precedence, determined by its rightmost terminal ( PLUS for the plus rule, etc.). But now, our general binop production only contains non-terminals. So the parser has no way to distinguish PLUS from TIMES at this level of abstraction, and will therefore do the same thing on such shift-reduce conflicts as:

expr binop expr . PLUS expr expr binop expr . TIMES expr

But it should decide differently depending on what the binop was!

The only solution I can think of to mitigate this is to stop halfway through this refactoring:

% nonassoc PLUS MINUS % nonassoc PLUSMINUS % nonassoc TIMES DIV % nonassoc TIMESDIV expr : | expr plusminus expr % prec PLUSMINUS { Binop ( $ 2 , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } | expr timesdiv expr % prec TIMESDIV { Binop ( $ 2 , $ 1 , $ 3 ) } plusminus : | PLUS { Plus } | MINUS { Minus } timesdiv : | TIMES { Times } | DIV { Div }

Now our shift-reduce conflicts look like:

expr plusminus expr . PLUS expr expr plusminus expr . TIMES expr

In the first case, the plusminus rule has precedence PLUSMINUS , which is higher than that of PLUS , so the parser correctly reduces (ensuring left-associativity of addition and subtraction).

In the second case, the plusminus rule (still) has precedence PLUSMINUS , but it is lower than that of TIMES , ensuring the precedence of multiplication over addition and subtraction.

But honestly, this halfway refactoring makes the grammar look more complicated that the redundant original one, so I don’t think it’s really worth it.

EDIT: Reddit user /u/Drupyog mentions the existence of a keyword %inline to handle this in Menhir. Nice!

That’s all for today!

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