It had been in the back of my mind nagging me for some time, thinking that we would eventually need some sort of preprocessor functionality moving forward, to support output for different programming languages (besides Java) and actually, even different Java targets. I had also been looking more closely at C# recently and finally, I …
(To get some prerequisite understanding of this topic, it might be a good idea to read this earlier blog post on context-sensitive tokenization from three months ago.) The Lay of the Land There are two quite useful ideas that have been in JavaCC from the very beginning: lookahead (particularly syntactic lookahead) lexical states Syntactic lookahead …
Context-Sensitive Tokenizing, Part Deux: Lexical States Read More »
Greetings, comrades! My name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Vladimirov! Hey, whassup, Vlad! As a follow-on to my blog post of a couple of days ago there were a couple of t’s that needed crossing and an ‘i’ or two that needed a dot. Let’s see… First of all, I misspoke a little bit in that post. …
Tree Building Redux: Nailing another Dmitry Dmitriyevich problem Read More »
Before getting into what the minor enhancements to tree building are, I guess I should write a quick synopsis of the current state of affairs. When you have TREE_BUILDING_ENABLED set to true (this is the default in JavaCC21) the tree building machinery will build a Node if the production results in the creation of more …
Tastes just like home-made! (Some more tree building enhancements) Read More »
I recently introduced a couple of "pseudo-annotations" (I’ll explain the pseudo part later) that can be used in code injections to express things in a much more succint manner. Here is an example: INJECT Foo : { @property String name; … } and the code generated in Foo.java corresponding to that line will be: private …
In conjunction with New Year 2021 (a landmark year for JavaCC 21 for sure!) I decided to scratch some longstanding itches — even at the expense of introducing some (minor) backward incompatibilities. The various option settings can only be set in the grammar file. There was a longstanding setup in legacy JavaCC (carried forward in …
Happy New Year! Some Backward-Incompatible API Changes! Read More »
One of my longstanding interests is language learning — I mean, human languages like Russian or Chinese, not computer languages. One striking thing about language learning is the extreme variability in people’s results. One observes that certain people, frequently very capable in other fields, will have some ongoing project of learning a language, Spanish for …
Since I started my work on resuscitating the JavaCC project, at least a couple of people have asked me how I can do this work if I have no theoretical background in computer science, specifically all this theory behind grammars and parsers. My response has typically amounted to saying: Watch me! I don’t know about …
Is All this Parsing theory just bullshit or what? Read More »
It was at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that 22-year-old German student Norbert Südhaus had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame — or infamy, rather. As a prank, he snuck into the stadium (security was much more lax back then) just before the winner of the marathon, the American Frank Shorter, was set to …
Thomas Hobbes famously said that in humankind’s natural state, a man’s life tends be "nasty, brutish, and short". I suppose the natural corollary of this is that in technologically advanced societies, life is comparatively "pleasant, peaceful, and long". Of those three things, it is the last one that can be measured most objectively; we see, …