Parsing is a difficult, but surprisingly ubiquitous programming problem, and functional programming has a lot to say about it. Let’s take a moment to understand the problem space of parsing, and see what tools Swift and Apple gives us to parse complex text formats.
Now that we’ve distilled parsing into a core, functional unit, it’s time to explore its transformable, composable properties. We’ll leverage earlier learnings by asking ourselves if parsers have a map operation, and if they have a zip operation, and if they have a flatMap operation.
