IBM Parser Generator

Olivier Lefevre <olivier.lefevre@wdr.com>
22 Dec 1998 04:40:29 -0500

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IBM Parser Generator olivier.lefevre@wdr.com (Olivier Lefevre) (1998-12-22)
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From: Olivier Lefevre <olivier.lefevre@wdr.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 22 Dec 1998 04:40:29 -0500
Organization: Warburg Dillon Read
Keywords: parse, tools

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.


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