The science, tools, strategies, patterns and tools behind the creation and processing of languages
There are many uses for Code Generation: We can generate repetitive code from schemas or source of information we have. For example, we can generate Data Access Objects from database schema files We can generate code from wizards We can generate skeletons of applications from simple models. We wrote about an example here: Code Generation […]
Excel is a great software but… for some tasks is just not the right tool. In this article we share a story of how Excel ended up costing billions of dollars because of a simple error. Luckily there is none in your spreadsheets 🙂 We all know how this happens: you start creating a short list […]
ANTLR can generate parsers in many languages: Java, C#, Python (2 and 3), JavaScript, Go, Swift, and C++. We have written an article to use an ANTLR C# parser and we have also written a mega tutorial to teach you how to use ANTLR with Java, C#, Python and JavaScript. In this article we are […]
Jetbrains MPS is a wonderful tool to create DSLs. We love it and use it regularly in our consultancy work. So we have written about Jetbrains MPS before. Being a projectional editor allows you to easily create DSLs that can be used through a graphical interface or things like mathematical formulas. Though all this power […]
Readers of this website will know that ANTLR is a great tool to quickly create parsers and help you in working with a known language or create your DSL. While the tool itself is written in Java, it can also be used to generate parsers in several other languages, for instance Python, C# or Javascript (with […]
There is a new weapon in the great war against JavaScript the struggle to allow developers to choose their favorite style of programming while improve performance and productivity. That weapon is WebAssembly, that will revolutionize client-side web development. WebAssembly, or wasm, is a low-level bytecode format for in-browser client-side scripting. If you are writing a […]
What Can You Do With Natural Language Processing? Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprises a set of techniques to work with documents written in a natural language to achieve many different objectives. They range from simple ones that any developer can implement, to extremely complex ones that require a lot of expertise. The following table illustrate […]
We have already introduced a few parsing terms, while listing the major tools and libraries used for parsing in Java, C#, Python and JavaScript. In this article we make a more in-depth presentation of the concepts and algorithms used in parsing, so that you can get a better understanding of this fascinating world. We have […]
HTML is a markup language with a simple structure. It would be quite easy to build a parser for HTML with a parser generator. Actually, you may not need even to do that, if you choose a popular parser generator, like ANTLR. That is because there are already available grammars ready to be used. HTML […]
The EBNF is the most commonly used formalism to describe the structure of languages. In this article we are going to see: What the EBNF Examples of grammars defined with EBNF How we can define a grammar using EBNF A few things to consider when using EBNF How to use EBNF in practice today A summary […]