I have a big project built by menhir and traditional makefile. First, I wanted to add a mechanism of error handling like this project to my project.
By following the dune of the sample project, I managed to generate .mly, .mli, .ml, .cmi and .cmo of unitActionsParser_e.mly by the following commands:
$ menhir --only-preprocess-u parser_e.mly > unitActionsParser_e.mly
$ menhir --table --external-tokens Parser_e unitActionsParser_e.mly
$ ocamlfind ocamlc -package menhirLib -c unitActionsParser_e.mli
And the incremental API and error handling did work.
Then, I wanted to add error recovery like this project to my project. Then, items state raised an error Error: Unbound value items in my project. Based on the manual and the dune, I guess I need to add --inspection somewhere.
I tried menhir --explain --inspection --table --dump --infer --external-tokens Parser_e unitActionsParser_e.mly, then camlfind ocamlc -package menhirLib -c unitActionsParser_e.mli raised an error Unbound type constructor Parser_e.terminal.
I also tried to directly work on parser_e.mly rather than using unitActionsParser_e by menhir --explain --inspection --table --dump --infer parser_e.mly, but it returned an error Unbound module Utility where Utility is a module in another folder needed by parser_e.mly. After I manually copied utility.cm* to the folder of parser_e.mly, it returned an error Unbound module Sedlexing (here is a fork where we can reproduce the error) (this is probably related to Interaction with build systems of the manual).
Does anyone know what are the correct commands and flags to generate a parser (either UnitActionsParser_e or Parser_e) enabling incremental API and inspection API of menhir?
(* link in discuss.ocaml.org: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/generate-a-parser-enabling-incremental-api-and-inspection-api/9380 *)
This question is indeed related to the interaction of menhir and build systems. Precisely, the inspection API (--inspection) requires the type information of .mly (including its semantic actions) to be known. I chose to directly work on parse_e.mly rather than unitActionsParser_e.mly, and followed the approach of "Obtaining OCaml type information without calling the OCaml compiler":
menhir --explain --inspection --table --dump --infer-write-query mockfile.ml parser_e.mly to generate mockfile.ml
ocamlfind ocamlc -I lib -package sedlex -package menhirLib -i mockfile.ml > sigfile to generate sigfile. Note that -I lib refers to the directory of external modules, their .cm[io] files should be ready to use.
menhir --explain --inspection --table --dump --infer-read-reply sigfile parser_e.mly to generate especially parser_e.ml, parser_e.mli, .conflicts and automaton.
As a result, parser_e.ml contains more type information and the inspection API is in Parser_e.MenhirInterpreter.