Agreed. As nice as clap is, it’s not a combinator. Parser combinators have a the really nice feature of sharing the same “shape” as the data they parse, which makes them trivial to generate from a schema … or to just use them to represent your schema in the first place ;) .
clap already supports all this: https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/struct.Arg.html#method.conflicts_with It’s just a great library, having you could think of and applying the same parse-don’t-validate mentality.
This doesn’t represent the mutual exclusivity through the type system (which is what the article is all about).
I love clap and I use it a lot, but the only way to represent the exclusivity through the type system in Rust is through an enum.
Agreed. As nice as clap is, it’s not a combinator. Parser combinators have a the really nice feature of sharing the same “shape” as the data they parse, which makes them trivial to generate from a schema … or to just use them to represent your schema in the first place ;) .