One of the very basic goals of this iteration of work on the JavaCC codebase, JavaCC 21, is to turn this into a capable tool for generating fault-tolerant parsers. Traditionally, not just JavaCC, but tools in this space generally, consider that it is their job to parse, i.e. to break down input into its various pieces …
A couple of weeks ago, I implemented a solution to a longstanding Dmitry Dmitriyevich problem with LOOKAHEAD specifications in JavaCC. Dmitry Dmitriyevich (alternatively Ivan Ivanovich or Vladimir Vladimirovich) is my own personal terminology for situations where you are required to write highly repetitive code. (Patriotic Irishmen are welcome to call this the Patrick Fitzpatrick or Gerald …
As a result of some private correspondence with one of the PMD developers (PMD makes extensive use of JavaCC) I started thinking about some issues that I had in the back of my mind to look into at a later point. Having recently ripped out the code in JavaCC 21 that supported putting LOOKAHEAD specifications …
Revisiting LOOKAHEAD in JavaCC, Attacking the Dmitry Dmitriyevich Problem Read More »
You know, I bet there are some long-term users of JavaCC who aren’t even aware that JavaCC has this thing called a JAVACODE production. (If you were unaware of this, you weren’t missing much!) Basically, the idea is that you can define something that is, to all intents and purposes, just a plain old java …
About to rip out JAVACODE productions. Does anybody object to this? Read More »
Today, I put in a little incremental effort on the included Java grammar and nailed the last couple of remaining cases that prevented it from parsing all of the java source files in the src.zip included in the JDK 13. There were a few remaining constructs that were still tripping it up and I finally …
Milestone: JavaCC 21 now supports the Java language up to JDK 13 Read More »
Programmatically generating code is a little world in itself, with its own little quirks and tricks. Consider the generation of the C-style switch-case with fall-through. You have your code generation that generates all your cases, and each case ends with a break. There is a problem, which is that the moment any of your case …
This is a response to a private email from Angelo Zerr, but finally, I thought to put my answer in public so that it could attract more general discussion. Angelo wrote me saying: I don’t know if I have explained very well my idea with tolerant, incremental parser and LSP generation project. But let for …
Fault tolerant parsing, is it a pipe dream? (An answer to Angelo Zerr) Read More »