Write Interpreter
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In computer science , a parsing expression grammar , or PEG , is a type of analytic formal grammar , i.e. it describes a formal language in terms of a set of rules for recognizing strings in the language. The formalism was introduced by Bryan Ford in 2004 [ 1 ] and is closely related to the family of top-down parsing languages introduced in the early 1970s. Syntactically, PEGs also look similar to context-free grammars (CFGs), but they have a different interpretation: the choice operator selects the first match in PEG, while it is ambiguous in CFG.
Parsing expression grammar
The Fast Lexical Analyser Generator JFlex User's Manual Version 1.4.3, January 31, 2009
JFlex - User's Manual
syntactic_recognition
Treetop grammars are written in a custom language based on parsing expression grammars. Literature on the subject of parsing expression grammars (PEGs) is useful in writing Treetop grammars. PEGs have no separate lexical analyser (since the algorithm has the same time-complexity guarantees as the best lexical analysers) so all whitespace and other lexical niceties (like comments) must be explicitly handled in the grammar. A further benefit is that multiple PEG grammars may be seamlessly composed into a single parser. Treetop grammars look like this: require "my_stuff" grammar GrammarName include Module::Submodule rule rule_name ... end rule rule_name ... end ... end
I gave a talk at London Ruby User Group yesterday, based on the work I’ve been doing on Heist , my Scheme interpreter project. I wrote the core of a basic Scheme interpreter in about 15 minutes as a live-coded demo (well, kind of – the coding was pre-recorded so I could focus on talking), which seemed to go down pretty well. If you missed it (or if you were there and want to watch it again in slow motion), here’s the slides and the video (just code, no narrative (sorry)). (Side note: I think Lisp may be affecting my writing style.)
The If Works - Talk: Writing a language in 15 minutes