Abstract
Tools for creating parsers are a key part of a mature language eco-system. Scala has traditionally relied on combinator libraries for defining parsers but being libraries they come with fundamental implementation limitations. An alternative is to use a Java-based parser generator such as ANTLR or Rats! but these tools are quite verbose and not ideal to use with Scala code. We describe our experiences with Scalafocused parser generation that is embodied in our sbt-rats plugin for the Scala Build Tool. At its simplest, sbt-rats provides a bridge to the Rats! parser generator for Java. On top of this bridge, we have a simple grammar definition notation that incorporates annotations for tree construction and pretty-printing. As well as generating a Rats! grammar, sbt-rats can optionally generate case class definitions for the tree structure and a pretty-printer defined using our Kiama language processing library. We explain the sbt-rats grammar notation and describe our positive experiences using it to define grammars for LLVM assembly notation and the SMTLIB input/output language for SMT solvers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | SCALA 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 7th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala |
| Editors | Aggelos Biboudis, Manohar Jonnalagedda, Sandro Stucki, Vlad Ureche |
| Place of Publication | New York |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
| Pages | 110-113 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450346481 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Oct 2016 |
| Event | 7th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala, SCALA 2016 - Amsterdam, Netherlands Duration: 30 Oct 2016 → 31 Oct 2016 |
Other
| Other | 7th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala, SCALA 2016 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Netherlands |
| City | Amsterdam |
| Period | 30/10/16 → 31/10/16 |
Keywords
- Parsing expression grammars
- Scala build tool