Parsec (parser combinator)

I think this is quite cool. (Parsing an IRC 'NICK foo' message)

special = oneOf "-[]\\`^{}_" -- Taken from RFC1459, except '_',
                             -- which I added (generally accepted character (are there others?)).

nick = do { string "NICK"; space;
            first <- letter; rest <- many1 $ alphaNum <|> special; eof;
            return $ Nick (first:rest) }

Not quite sure what I think of it in comparison to regular expressions, yet.

>>15

I know UnrealIRCd supports additionals charsets. It's probably a bit tricky to do right, because not all clients use the same character encoding (Shift_JIS, GBK, W1251/W1251 and whathaveyou).

>>23
That does sound tricky. I won't implement any additional support initially. Having a look at UnrealIRCd's source code might prove helpful when I do, however.