Title: The metafront system: Safe and extensible parsing and transformation
Abstract: We present the metafront tool for specifying flexible, safe, and efficient syntactic transformations between languages defined by context-free grammars. The transformations are guaranteed to terminate and to map grammatically legal input to grammatically legal output. We rely on a novel parser algorithm that is designed to support gradual extensions of a grammar by allowing productions to remain in a natural style and by statically reporting ambiguities and errors in terms of individual productions as they are being added. Our tool may be used as a parser generator in which the resulting parser automatically supports a flexible, safe, and efficient macro processor, or as an extensible lightweight compiler generator for domain-specific languages. We show substantial examples of both kinds.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-05-19
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 14
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