Reusable Grammars

A parser is an essential component of a TransformationSystem. It is often a considerable investment to develop a good syntax definition for use in a transformation system. To ease the development of transformation systems it is helpful to develop grammars, syntax definitions, or parsers that can be reused accross projects. This page is intended to collect information on availability of reusable grammars and discuss issues in making grammars reusable. -- EelcoVisser - 20 Oct 2001

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Collections

The following sites offer collections of reusable grammars. Please add links to other sites.

• The Tools.SDF2 GrammarBase^?
• Grammars homepage at VU: http://www.cs.vu.nl/grammars/
• The JavaCC grammar collection: http://www.cobase.cs.ucla.edu/pub/javacc/

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Reusing grammars across parser generators

A reusable syntax definition is not of much use when it is not written for your favourite programming language. To make syntax definitions even more reusable it useful to have migration tools that can be used to translate a syntax definition from one formalism to another.

The Tools.XT transformation toolset provides tools for GrammarRecovery^?, e.g., translating YACC grammars to SDF2, and SyntaxImprovement^?.

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I bumbed into an article by ChrisVerhoef and RalfLaemmel the other day in which they describe how to extract a usable grammar from the Cobol standard -- just appeared in Software Practice and Experience. -- ArieVanDeusren^?; 20 Oct 2001.

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CategorySyntax | Contributions by EelcoVisser