The science, tools, strategies, patterns and tools behind the creation and processing of languages
ANTLR is a popular parser generator or “compiler-compiler”, developed by prof. Terence Parr and several contributors. It’s been around since 1992, as an evolution of PCCTS. It’s gone through multiple major versions. The latest incarnation of ANTLR is version branch 4.x, the first release of which is from 2013. Here at Strumenta, we use ANTLR4 […]
Introduction A transpiler is a program that can process code in a certain language and generate the corresponding code in another language. You can find also other terms being used, like source-to-source translator. When you may want to use a transpiler? Simply put, when you have a project that is giving value to you but […]
This post is part of a series. The goal of the series is to describe how to create a useful language and all the supporting tools. Building a lexer Building a parser Creating an editor with syntax highlighting Build an editor with autocompletion Mapping the parse tree to the abstract syntax tree Model to model […]
This post is part of a series. The goal of the series is to describe how to create a useful language and all the supporting tools. Building a lexer Building a parser Creating an editor with syntax highlighting Build an editor with autocompletion Mapping the parse tree to the abstract syntax tree Model to model […]
You can find the code presented in this article in the companion repository SQL is a language to handle data in a relational database. If you worked with data you have probably worked with SQL. It is in the same league of HTML: maybe you never learned it formally but you kinda know how to […]
Introduction textX is a suite of Python modules and tools to quickly develop text-based domain-specific languages. Compared to heavyweight language workbenches such as Jetbrains MPS, Eclipse Xtext or Spoofax, textX is less powerful and not as feature-rich; however, it’s directly usable in Python with minimal effort as it’s just another Python library, and it has […]
There are some ideas that are gaining popularity: blockchains and smart contracts are among them. If we can ignore the hype and the inflated expectations I think they maybe ideas with a strong potential impact. I do not want to talk about these technologies in general but just from the point of view of a […]
Introduction In this article, we’ll review JaRIKo, an open-source interpreter for a subset of the RPG programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine. People interested in legacy modernization techniques should find this interesting: as we’ll see in the course of the article, the driving force behind JaRIKo is the ultimate migration of a product with thousands […]
In the field of parsing Lex and Yacc, as well as their respective successors flex and GNU Bison, have a sort of venerable status. And you could still use them today. But you should not do that. In this article will explain why they have problems and show you some alternatives. Lex and Yacc were […]
It has been more than two years since the last major release of ANTLR, now version 4.8 is ready. ANTLR is a mature and well-tested project, but this release still manages to bring a new target, a fix for the C# packet, improvement on the compilation of the C++ runtime and a few fixes. New […]