[Haskell-cafe] C++ Parser?

[Christopher Brown]

Hi Jason,

Thanks very much for you thoughtful response.

I am intrigued about the Happy route: as I have never really used Happy before, am I right in thinking I could take the .gr grammar, feed it into Happy to generate a parser, or a template for a parser, and then go from there?

Chris.



On 24 Jan 2012, at 15:16, Jason Dagit wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 6:54 AM, Christopher Brown
> <cmb21 at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>> 
>> Thanks for everyone's kind responses: very helpful so far!
>> 
>> I fully appreciate and understand how difficult writing a C++ parser is. However I may need one for our new Paraphrase project, where I may be targeting C++ for writing a refactoring tool. Obviously I don't want to start writing one myself, hence I was asking if anyone new about an already existing implementation.
>> 
>> Rose looks interesting, I'll check that out, thanks!
> 
> I did some more digging after sending my email.  I didn't learn about
> GLR parser when I was in school, but that seems to be what the cool
> compilers use these days.  Then I discovered that Happy supports GLR,
> that is happy!
> 
> Next I found that GLR supposedly makes C++ parsing much easier than
> LALR, "The reason I wrote Elkhound is to be able to write a C++
> parser. The parser is called Elsa, and is included in the distribution
> below."  The elsa documentation should give you a flavor for what
> needs to be done when making sense of C++:
> http://scottmcpeak.com/elkhound/sources/elsa/index.html
> 
> NB: I don't think it's been seriously worked on since 2005 so I assume
> it doesn't match the latest C++ spec.
> 
> The grammar that elsa parses is here, one warning is that it doesn't
> reject all invalid programs (eg., it errs on the side of accepting too
> much): http://scottmcpeak.com/elkhound/sources/elsa/cc.gr
> 
> I think the path of least resistance is pure rose without the haskell
> support.  Having said that, I think the most fun direction would be
> converting the elsa grammar to happy.  It's just that you'll have a
> lot of work (read: testing, debugging, performance tuning, and then
> adding vendor features) to do.  One side benefit is that you'll know
> much more about the intricacies of C++ when you're done than if you
> use someone else's parser.
> 
> Jason
> 
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