I’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of months because I have been very busy at work and at home I have been slowly chipping away at a new Parser for MetaSharp.

It’s very late at night here so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail right now but suffice it to say that currently my Parser is completely hand written and right now I’m working on a Transform step that will let me generate Parsers from a grammar. The goal is to generate the Parser from the Grammar grammar!

I still have a long way to go but here is what I do have. The following Grammar:

grammar Simple < MetaSharp.Transformation.Parsing.Common.BasicParser:
    Alphabet = (A | B | C)+;
    A = "a";
    B = "b";
    C = "c";
end

Produces the following code:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// <auto-generated>
//     This code was generated by a tool.
//     Runtime Version:4.0.21006.1
//
//     Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if
//     the code is regenerated.
// </auto-generated>
//------------------------------------------------------------------------------

public partial class Simple : MetaSharp.Transformation.Parsing.Common.BasicParser
{

    internal new static System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<string> Imports;

    static Simple()
    {
        Simple.Imports = new string[0];
    }

    public Simple(MetaSharp.Transformation.IContext context) :
        base(context)
    {
        MetaSharp.Transformation.IRuleService ruleService =
            this.Context.Locate<MetaSharp.Transformation.IRuleService>();
        this.Add(
            newMetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.OrPattern(
                ruleService.GetRule("Alphabet", Simple.Imports),
                ruleService.GetRule("A", Simple.Imports),
                ruleService.GetRule("B", Simple.Imports),
                ruleService.GetRule("C", Simple.Imports)));
    }
}

[MetaSharp.Transformation.RuleExportAttribute(typeof(AlphabetRule))]
public class AlphabetRule : MetaSharp.Transformation.Rule
{

    protected override void Initialize()
    {
        this.Body = new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.OneOrMorePattern(
            new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.OrPattern(
                new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.OrPattern(
                    this.Rules.GetRule("A", Simple.Imports),
                    this.Rules.GetRule("B", Simple.Imports)),
                    this.Rules.GetRule("C", Simple.Imports)));
        base.Initialize();
    }
}

[MetaSharp.Transformation.RuleExportAttribute(typeof(ARule))]
public class ARule : MetaSharp.Transformation.Rule
{

    protected override void Initialize()
    {
        this.Body = new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.StringPattern("a");
        base.Initialize();
    }
}

[MetaSharp.Transformation.RuleExportAttribute(typeof(BRule))]
public class BRule : MetaSharp.Transformation.Rule
{

    protected override void Initialize()
    {
        this.Body = new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.StringPattern("b");
        base.Initialize();
    }
}

[MetaSharp.Transformation.RuleExportAttribute(typeof(CRule))]
public class CRule : MetaSharp.Transformation.Rule
{

    protected override voidInitialize()
    {
        this.Body = new MetaSharp.Transformation.Patterns.StringPattern("c");
        base.Initialize();
    }
}

It’s a pretty trivial grammar for now but this should give you an idea of where this is going. The RuleExportAttribute inherits from the MEF ExportAttribute and the concrete IRuleService uses MEF to supply rules using these attributes.

It’s exciting!

I’ve been working on a custom variant of an OMeta parser for a couple weeks now. It’s coming along pretty well, I think I’ve overcome most of the major hurdles and I’m just trying to go through what I currently have, clean it up and get it to solve some of the edge cases that I need.

Just now I was working on the grammar for parsing a character and realized how hard it really is. It sounds trivial, afterall it’s just two single quotes and a character right? Wrong. Here’s my current grammar:

CharacterLiteralToken
    = '\'' '\\' 'u' Hex#4 '\''
    | '\'' '\\' 'U' Hex#8 '\''
    | '\'' '\\' 'x' Hex Hex? Hex? Hex? '\''
    | '\'' '\\' ('\'' | '\"' | '\\' | '0' | 'a' | 'b' | 'f' | 'n' | 'r' | 't' | 'v') '\''
    | '\'' '\u0000'..'\uffff' '\'';

It turns out that you have to be sure to account for a multitude of escape characters as well as escaped Unicode literals. I didn’t want to have to implement this, but you can see the last rule which just matches every character under the sun needed it.

This will match:

• '\u0000'
• '\U00000000'
• '\x0', '\x00', '\x000', '\x0000'
• '\'', '\"', '\\', '\0', '\a', '\b', '\f', '\n', '\r', '\t', '\v'
• 'a' …

Next I get to do the string parser… that should be even more interesting.

The book DSLs in Boo: Domain-Specific Languages in .NET written by Oren Eini writing as Ayende Rahien has finally shipped. The final version is available online at Manning Press and I highly recommend it.

I was one of the technical reviewers so I have already read this book and I can tell you first hand it’s definitely one for your book shelf. The first few chapters describe the generalities of DSLs and Boo then the subsequent chapters describe all of the details you might need to know to implement an internal DSL in your application.

If you’ve been wondering about the whole DSL thing, this book would be a good gateway to the world. It’ll stretch your brain and certainly expose you to some new ideas. In addition the author makes a good case for some practical business applications and introduces a new addition to the open source scene: Rhino DSL.

I also got an honorable mention in the acknowledgments section of the book and a special quote on the Manning Press web site that’s pretty cool! Check out it out!