D Parsing (again)/ D grammar

Vladimir Kazanov via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Oct 2 06:49:10 PDT 2014


Hello, everyone!

Recently, I have been doing some experimental work related to 
generalized parser generators. It is not yet ready for a public 
release, I am not even sure it will ever be. Anyway, right now I 
am considering adding D as a target for parser generation. 
Actually, it's more than that: the grand target is to be able to 
generate a D language parser in D. With Python, for example, it 
is rather easy, as I can just mechanically transform the original 
grammar into a suitable form and be done with it.

The generator itself is quite powerful, theoretically it should 
be able to handle all context-free grammar (see 
http://dotat.at/tmp/gll.pdf for theory).

There is a grammar page on dlang.org 
(http://dlang.org/grammar.html). I have also found a related 
discussion in the forum 
(http://forum.dlang.org/thread/bwsofbnigfbrxwouiobj@forum.dlang.org). 
 From the discussion I found out that D parser is a hand-made 
RD-parser with "a few tricks"(c).

So, my questions:

1. How realistic is the grammar? Is it a real one or just a 
sketch of sorts? Is it something developers use to build the 
parser?

2. There's also a D grammar for Pegged. How good is it? Can it be 
used as a starting point to build a parser?


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