IBM Parser Generator

The IBM Jikes (a Java compiler) team uses its own parser generator.
They say:


      Work on the parser generator started in 1983. It
      implements [Philppe] Charles's Ph.D. Dissertation on Automatic
      Error Recovery and also includes several additional
      compression algorithms he developed later. It has been
      used inside IBM by various groups for over a decade.


and


      One little-known feature of Jikes is that we maintain a
      COMPLETE program representation -- every token (with
      line and column numbers), every comment, and the AST
      (abstract syntax tree) reflects the program exactly as
      written. You can determine if a cast was explicitly written
      or if it was required by language semantics. You can even
      recover parentheses written in expressions, etc.


Apart from that it seems to be a traditional LALR(k) pg. Based
on that (probably incomplete) information, I'd be curious to know
whether they are doing anything that the other parsers out there
can't do. I guess the compression is likely to be the more original
feature.


Thanks,


-- O.L.

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.