ANN: Kakuy! A tool to help people learn/teach general parsing techniques

This message is to announce Kakuy!.
Kakuy! is a free Algorithm Visualization (AV) software tool to help people
studying Earley's and Younger-Cocke-Kasami (YCK) general parsing
techniques.


  Kakuy! is part of the AV toolset developed under SEPa! Project (Spanish
acronym for Software for Teaching Parsing Techniques). It has been
successfully used in the last years by the students of "Compilers and
Interpreters" course at the Universidad Católica de Santiago del Estero
(Republica Argentina).


Kakuy! is a win32 application (the Linux port is a future project)
designed following the design guidelines of the Working Group on
"Improving the Educational Impact of Algorithm
Visualization" with the following functionalities (among others):


* Kakuy! can manage grammars in Yacc, BNF, EDU ("plain" grammar notation
used in textbooks) and GRM formats. Kakuy! accepts any CFG, this
includes: ambiguous and cyclic grammars. Dynamically diaplays info about
algorithm invariants.


* Animate Earley's general parsing technique: forward and backward (VCR
metaphore) step-by-step visual animation, draws and displays the parsing
shared forest and all individual trees (up to a configurable limit for
infinitely ambiguous grammars), detailed and dynamic text description
(log) for each action performed by the parser and right/left most
derivations displaying. Dynamically diaplays info about algorithm
invariants.


* Animate YCK's general parsing technique: forward and backward
step-by-step visual animation, chart/shared_forest and trees drawing,
detailed and dynamic text description (log) for each action performed by
the parser and right/left most derivations displaying.


* Carry out some grammar transformations as:
- removal of useless symbols
- removal of epsilon-productions
- removal of direct/indirect left recursion
- removal of unit productions
- transformation to Chomsky's normal form
- transformation to Greibach's normal form
- language vacuity detection
- cycles/loops detection and removal


* Easy configure the language of menus and messages. The available
languages are English and Spanish. A new language can be added by editing
a plain text file so we are looking for people interested in translate to
other languages (and, of course, to improve our English translation)


* Comes with a large set of "ready to work" example grammars.


* Customizable colors, animation speed, etc.


A full functional copy of Kakuy! can be freely downloaded from
http://www.ucse.edu.ar/fma/sepa/kakuy_download.php


It would please us that you test Kakuy! and send your comments and
suggestions.


For more information about Kakuy! and the other SEPa! tools you can visit
www.ucse.edu.ar/fma/sepa or email us to sepa @ ucse . edu . ar


Best regards,


The SEPa! Project Team
---
Facultad de Matemática Aplicada
Universidad Católica de Santiago del Estero (República Argentina)
URL: www.ucse.edu.ar/fma/sepa
email: sepa @ ucse . edu . ar

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