This has been by far the most demanding episode to write in these series of tutorials, but finally it's there. See http://code.google.com/p/fs-gamedev/wiki/Tutorial10 for the text and source code.
This tutorial shows how to parse .X files, which are used for 3d models and scenes. Note that DirectX offers convenient functions to manipulate these files, meaning that the practical usefulness of the code in this tutorial is limited, unless you don't have access to DirectX.
This tutorial demonstrates the following concepts:
* Discriminated unions and simple pattern matching
* Stateless lexing
* Hiding side effects in IO operations
* Error handling using the option type
* Defining mutually and self dependent types
* Building functions at run-time by combining basic functions
The content of this tutorial is significantly denser than usual. The really interesting part in my opinion resides however in the design decision to separate parsing in two stages. During the first stage, second-stage parsers are dynamically created by combining simple parsers (such as a semi-colon parser, an int parser, even a "zero" parser parsing nothing). Second-stage parsing simply consists of calling the result of first-stage parsing, which results in hierarchical data representing faces, lights and materials composing a 3d scene.
