DISCLAIMER

THIS SOFTWARE IS HARDLY TESTED AND IS UNDER HEAVY DEVELOPMENT.

UNSUPERVISED EXPOSURE CAN RESULT IN:

stroke
brain-cancer
cardiac arythmia
sterility
miscairage
bubonic plague

Intro

libparse is a new parsing library for C. It can be used directly, it can be targeted by parser-generators, it can be used through any arbitrary dynamic domain specific language, or it can generate 'native' parsers.

Terminology

We use some terms like REGEX which do not mean what you think they mean. These are vestigial terms from an earlier phase in the design of the library. We will eventually want to change them.

Design

The design philosophy of libparse is as follows:

Variable char-width: libparse doesn't assume 8-bit characters. It can deal with any number of bits, and it doesn't have to be uniform. This means that libparse can be used to parse ascii, utf8, utf64, and pretty much any kind of binary data.

Library architecture: implementing the parsing framework as a library, allows developers to use it directly, while preserving the capability to build domain specific languages on top of it. Additionally, because there is no global state in the library, developers can specify multiple parsers in the same library consumer. This can be done in yacc, with a hack. The hack involves running a script over the generated C code files and changing the variable and function naming. The developer shouldn't have to bend over backwards like this.

Graph-based: The grammars are specified as a libgraph graph. The grammar is essentially static data. We can run a grammar on an input by 'interpreting' the graph. However, since the grammar is just data, one can write code to compile the grammar-graph into code (any code). Furthermore, the AST is implemented as a graph, and is built automatically, when running a grammar on an input. The calls for manipulating the AST are also available to the consumer, so that the consumer can -- for example -- programatically modify the AST. Additionally grammars can be programmatically modified, which makes it easy to automate away repetitive tasks.

Limitations

Dynamic Tokens