Re: Has anyone hand-written a scanner/parser module?

On Nov 15, 5:49 pm, "tuxisthebirdfo...@gmail.com"
<tuxisthebirdfo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I know most people anymore use lex/yacc or some derivative of these
> tools to create scanner/parser modules for their compiler projects. I
> was wondering if anyone has developed a scanner or parser that they
> personally hand-wrote? ...


I've hand written the scanner/parser for my language Wrapl for a
while. I originally wrote them in Icon, then Modula-2, Modula-3, C and
currently in C++. However they all had the same basic structure, which
you find in many scanner/parsers:


The scanner has 3 main functions:


a method/function "next" which advances the scanner to the next token


a method/function "parse" which checks that the current token is a
particular token or in a set of tokens. If the current token is
"none", call next(). If the current token matches, the current token
is set to "none". Returns true/false if the current token matched or
not. The current token values (e.g. line/column number, integer/string
value) is available from the scanner.


a method/function "accept" which behaves similarly to "parse" but
throws an error if the match fails.


The parser consists of many "parse_???" and "accept_???" functions,
built up from the other parse/accept functions. The trickiest part is
the infix operation parser, since it has to deal with different levels
of precedence. At first I had a different function for each level,
like "parse_expr_NN" where NN was the precedence level. But that
became tedious to modify, so I now use a function "parse_expr(level)"
where level is a parameter and the function contains a switch
statement that switches on the level, each case falling through to
higher precedence expressions.


If you're brave you can find the source for my scanner/parser at
http://wrapl.sf.net/download.html#source; the scanner/parser is in the
dev/src/Lib/Wrapl/Loader/scanner.c and dev/src/Lib/Wrapl/Loader/
parser.c files, but they lack commenting.


Raja

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