Parser Generators Sharing LR Automaton Generators and Accepting General Purpose Programming Language-based Specifications

Jintaeck Lim, Gayoung Kim, Seunghyun Shin, Kwanghoon Choi, Iksoon Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2020.47.1.52

This paper proposes two ways to develop LR parsers easily. First, one can write a parser specification in a general programming language and derive the benefits of syntax error checking, code completion, and type-error checking over the specification from the language’s development environment. Second, to make it easy to develop a parser tool for a new programming language, the automata generation for the parser specifications is in a modular form. With the idea proposed in this study, we developed a tool for writing parsers in Python, Java, C++, and Haskell. We also demonstrated the two aforementioned advantages in an experiment.