Nez: Practical Open Grammar Language Kimio Kuramitsu Yokohama National University, JAPAN
[email protected] http://nez-peg.github.io/ Abstract tions. Developers use a formal grammar, such as LALR(k), LL(k), Nez is a PEG(Parsing Expressing Grammar)-based open gram- or PEG, to specify programming language syntax. Based on the mar language that allows us to describe complex syntax constructs grammar specification, a parser generator tool, such as Yacc[14], without action code. Since open grammars are declarative and ANTLR3/4[29], or Rats![9], produces an efficient parser code that free from a host programming language of parsers, software engi- can be integrated with the host language of the compiler and inter- neering tools and other parser applications can reuse once-defined preter. This generative approach, obviously, enables developers to grammars across programming languages. avoid error-prone coding for lexical and syntactic analysis. A key challenge to achieve practical open grammars is the ex- Traditional parser generators, however, are not entirely free pressiveness of syntax constructs and the resulting parser perfor- from coding. One particular reason is that the formal grammars mance, as the traditional action code approach has provided very used today lack sufficient expressiveness for many of the pop- pragmatic solutions to these two issues. In Nez, we extend the ular programming language syntaxes, such as typedef in C/C++ symbol-based state management to recognize context-sensitive lan- and other context-sensitive syntaxes[3, 8, 9]. In addition, a formal guage syntax, which often appears in major programming lan- grammar itself is a syntactic specification of the input language, not guages.