We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).  We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday. In Chapter 8, Functional Parsers, it's all about parsing and parsers. A parser is a program that analyses a piece of text to determine its syntactic structure. In a functional language such as Haskell, parsers can naturally be viewed as functions.   type Parser = String -> Tree A parser is a function that takes a string and returns some form of tree. You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain): Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7...