[garmaine]

That was where I stopped reading. If a library like lens—used by nearly every haskeller in every project—was disallowed, I don’t know what the purpose of this exercise was.

[pyrale]

Lens is far from being used by everyone in the space. On a sample of 5-6 professional users I talked with at this zurihac, most didn't use it.

[aliceryhl]

I mean, it seems like it was an university course, and writing a compiler from scratch is probably a decent exercise in a compiler course.

[garmaine]

Restrict the students from using a parser library. I get that. But allowing nothing except that standard library? That’s stupid.

It also makes the language comparison useless. Python has a standard library that is continuously improved and people reach to that when writing programs. Haskell, like C, ossified it’s standard library when it was created and people use the external packages for equivalent up to date libraries.

[Ericson2314]

Parsers are not the interesting parts of compilers.