The parser has some recovery heuristics but they will not always achieve
the best result. To prevent unsuccessful recovery from causing a cascade
of confusing follow-on errors, we'll track in the parser whether recovery
has been attempted and then the specific sub-parsers can use this to
skip certain "unexpected token type" errors in recovery situations,
assuming instead that an earlier error will cover the problem and that
we just want to bail out quickly.
Mirroring the Lex... triplet of functions, callers here can choose to
parse in one of three modes:
- ParseConfig is the main entry point and parses what we might consider
a whole config file.
- ParseExpression parses a sequence as an isolated expression, which
may be useful in implementing a REPL to inspect configuration or
application state.
- ParseTemplate parses a sequence as an isolated template, which may be
useful in parsing external files as templates, for situations where the
input is too large to be conveniently embedded within configuration.
This LexConfig, LexExpression and LexTemplate set of functions allow
outside callers to use the scanner in isolation, skipping the parser.
This may be useful for use-cases such as syntax highlighting, separate
parsers (such as the one in zclwrite), and so forth. Most callers should
use the parser (once implemented) though, to get a semantic AST.