It is often useful to use a single grammar to describe multiple parsers, where each parser has a different top-level non-terminal, but parts of the grammar are shared between parsers. A classic example of this is an interpreter, which needs to be able to parse both entire files and single expressions: the expression grammar is likely to be identical for the two parsers, so we would like to use a single grammar but have two entry points.

Happy lets you do this by allowing multiple %name directives in the grammar file. The %name directive takes an optional second parameter specifying the top-level non-terminal for this parser, so we may specify multiple parsers like so:

%name parse1 non-terminal1
%name parse2 non-terminal2

Happy will generate from this a module which defines two functions parse1 and parse2, which parse the grammars given by non-terminal1 and non-terminal2 respectively. Each parsing function will of course have a different type, depending on the type of the appropriate non-terminal.