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Upgrade of Lark Compiler Generator to Support Attribute Grammars

Authors Daniel Faria, Tiago João Baptista, Pedro Rangel Henriques

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Author Details

Daniel Faria
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI - DI, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Tiago João Baptista
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI - DI, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
Pedro Rangel Henriques
  • ALGORITMI Research Centre/LASI - DI, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Funding

This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.

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Daniel Faria, Tiago João Baptista, and Pedro Rangel Henriques. Upgrade of Lark Compiler Generator to Support Attribute Grammars. In 13th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2024). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 120, pp. 7:1-7:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2024.7

Abstract

This document presents an initiative aimed at advancing parsing and language processing through the integration of Attribute Grammars (AG) into the Lark Compiler Generator, a flexible tool frequently used for these tasks. In order to achieve a successful integration of AGs into Lark, a study on the concept and example analysis of AG based specifications needed to be conducted. This provided an insight on their advantages in order to extend Lark with the ability to use AG, that will be presented in this article. With this project, named LarkAG, we aim at providing Lark with a conventional and well studied formalism to specify rigorously the static and dynamic semantics of programming languages, on top of its recognized syntactic analysis capabilities. Along the paper, LarkAG architecture, development and usage are also discussed. The DSL designed to provide a proper notation for attribute occurrences selection and for writing semantic rules and context conditions is also presented. This addition of AG support to Lark will enable the construction of compilers and language processors of greater reliability. It is not a major breakthrough since AGs based tools already exist and are well studied, but rather an extension that can bring great value to a modern framework such as Lark.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Grammars and context-free languages
Keywords
  • Formal Language Specification
  • Formal Language Processing
  • Attribute Grammars
  • Compiler Generation
  • Lark

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