Safe Serialization Under Mutual Suspicion/"Reversing" Evaluation
From Erights
As we've seen, we make serializers, unserializers, and other transformers like expression simplifiers by composing a recognizer with a builder. The interface between the two is the DEBuilder API, explained in Appendix A: The Data-E Manual. Since most of the API is a straightforward reflection of the Data-E grammar productions, if you wish, you may safely skip these details and proceed here by example.
Evaluating Data-E
The semantics of Data-E are defined by the semantics of its evaluation as an E program. We could unserialize using the full E evaluator. However, this is inefficient both as an implementation and as an explanation. Instead, here is the Data-E evaluator as a builder, implementing exactly this subset of E's semantics.