About half a year ago, I wrote a post about ripping out so-called JAVACODE productions. I have to admit that I had almost forgotten about that whole issue (or maybe ersatz issue…) but just now Jan Monterrubio of the JSQLParser project asked me about this and I figured it would be better to answer the …
In the beginning there was… CommonTokenAction Legacy JavaCC had (and still has) a means of applying whatever adjustments (a.k.a. kludges) to a Token just before it is handed off to the parser machinery. You could define a method called CommonTokenAction in your Lexer TokenManager class and this method is invoked when you get another Token …
Not too long ago, I implemented a new syntactical element in JavaCC, that I call the up-to-here marker. To recap: Suppose you have a production like this: FooBar : “foo” “bar” Baz; NB. I am moving towards always just using the newer streamlined syntax in any examples and documentation. For the record, if you really …
Over the last days, I announced certain new features but then realized that they really needed certain key enhancements. I refer to the new FAIL statement and the up-to-here notation, the latter of which I only announced three days ago! The FAIL statement On first implementation, the FAIL statement allowed you to write something like: …
Revisiting LOOKAHEAD Redux Not so long ago, I had a sort of eureka moment when I realized that the legacy LOOKAHEAD construct was fundamentally half-baked or broken. Not only that, but I started narrowing in on how to definitely address the issue! Well, let’s get concrete. Suppose we have a production that looks kind of like this: FooBar : …
New Feature: The =>|| delimiter stands for “scan up to here” Read More »
The FAIL construct is really pretty dead simple. Here is an example: A. ( “foo” | “bar” | FAIL “Was expecting \”foo\” or \”bar\” here!” ) At first I thought the above was just syntactic sugar, since you can, of course, already write: B. ( “foo” | “bar” | {throw new ParseException(“Was expecting \”foo\”or “\bar\” …
If you liked LOOKAHEAD, then you’ll love LOOKBEHIND! Actually, I have not added LOOKBEHIND as a new keyword in JavaCC. It is just an informal way of referring to a new feature that I recently added. I implemented this because I realized that there was a very common thing people want to do in a JavaCC grammar …
A few months ago, I started re-examining some of the legacy JavaCC syntax. I realized the pure absurdity of having to write: LOOKAHEAD(Foo() Bar() Baz()) Foo() Bar() Baz() In short order, I allowed people to write the above as: LOOKAHEAD Foo() Bar() Baz() But this started me thinking…. I reasoned that there were doubtless plenty …
In my last post I reported that I had finally fixed the way syntactic lookahead works in JavaCC. This leads to the natural question: what about semantic lookahead? Well, what is historically called semantic lookahead in JavaCC is actually misnamed. It’s really just a bit of java code that is used to determine whether to enter an expansion or not. Something like: …
Fixed a Longstanding Bug Known Issue in JavaCC: Nested syntactic lookahead now works! There is a quite serious bug (let’s just call it by what it is, shall we?) of very long standing in JavaCC. Basically, syntactic lookaheads do not nest. This bug is documented in Theodore Norvell’s JavaCC FAQ, which by the way, is the best …
Bugfix! Nested syntactic lookahead now works correctly! Read More »