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The METAFRONT System: Extensible Parsing and Transformation
Claus Brabrand
February 2003 |
Abstract:
We present the metafront tool for specifying flexible, safe,
and efficient syntactic transformations between languages defined by
context-free grammars. The transformations are guaranteed to terminate and to
map grammatically legal input to grammatically legal output.
We rely on a novel parser algorithm that is designed to support gradual extensions of a grammar by allowing productions to remain in a natural style and by statically reporting ambiguities and errors in terms of individual productions as they are being added. Our tool may be used as a parser generator in which the resulting parser automatically supports a flexible, safe, and efficient macro processor, or as an extensible lightweight compiler generator for domain-specific languages. We show substantial examples of both kinds. Available as PostScript, PDF, DVI. |