Motivating examples
good:
SELECT a, b, c d,e FROM t1
bad:
SE L ECT a, b, c d,e FR OM t1
SELECTa, b, c d,eFROMt1
So as you can see problem here is that some spaces are ok(between SELECT and a,b,c for example) and some are bad(SE L ECT) and some are neccessary(after/before keyword).
So my question is what idioms to use here since if I use space skipper with phrase_parse it will allow bad spaces and if I want to allow good spaces without a skipper parsers become littered with *char_(' ')
You need to mark your keywords as qi::lexeme[].
Besides, you probably want something like boost::spirit::repository::qi::distinct to avoid parsing SELECT2 as SELECT followed by 2.\
See e.g.
Boost spirit skipper issues
boost::spirit::qi keywords and identifiers
What you're looking for is, well, parsing.
It's not about accepting/rejecting "good" or "bad" spaces. It is about trying to recognize what's entered, and rejecting it if you can't.
In this case, let's start with a (thoroughly simplified) grammar for the statement in question:
select_statement ::= 'select' field_list 'from' table
So, you read in the first token. If it's SE or SELECTa, you reject the statement as invalid, because neither of those fits your grammar. Almost any decent parser generator (including, but certainly not limited to, Spirit) makes this fairly trivial--you specify what is acceptable, and what to do if the input is not acceptable, and it deals with invoking that for input that doesn't fit the specified grammar.
As for how you do the tokenization to start with, it's typically pretty simple, and usually can be based on regular expressions (e.g., many languages have been implemented using lex and derivatives like Flex, which use regexen to specify tokenization).
For something like this, you directly specify the keywords for your language, so you'd have something that says when it matches 'select', it should return that as a token. Then you have something more general for an identifier that typically runs something like `[_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]*' ("an identifier starts with an underscore or letter, followed by an arbitrary number of underscores, letters, or digits"). In the cases above, this would be entirely sufficient to find and return the "SE" and "SELECTa" as the first tokens in the "bad" examples.
Your parser would then detect that the first thing it received was an identifier instead of a key word, at which point it would (presumably) be rejected.
Related
I am trying to wrap my head around an assignment question, therefore I would very highly appreciate any help in the right direction (and not necessarily a complete answer). I am being asked to write the grammar specification for this parser. The specification for the grammar that I must implement can be found here:
http://anoopsarkar.github.io/compilers-class/decafspec.html
Although the documentation is there, I do not understand a few things, such as how to write (in my .y file) things such as
{ identifier },+
I understand that this would mean a comma-separated list of 1 (or more) occurrences of an identifier, however when I write it as such, the compiler displays an error of unrecognized symbols '+' and ',', being mistaken as whitespace. I tried '{' identifier "},+", but I haven't the slightest clue whether that is correct or not.
I have written the lexical analyzer portion (as it was from the previous segment of the assignment) which returns tokens (T_ID, T_PLUS, etc.) accordingly, however there is this new notion that I must assign 'yylval' to be the value of the token itself. To my understanding, this is only necessary if I am in need of the actual value of the token, therefore I would need the value of an identifier token T_ID, but not necessarily the value of T_PLUS, being '+'. This is done by creating a %union in the parser generator file, which I have done, and have provided the tokens that I currently believe would require the literal token value with the proper yylval assignment.
Here is my lexical analysis code (I could not get it to format properly, I apologize): https://pastebin.com/XMZwvWCK
Here is my parser file decafast.y: https://pastebin.com/2jvaBFQh
And here is the final piece of code supplied to me, the C++ code to build an abstract syntax tree at the end:
https://pastebin.com/ELy53VrW?fbclid=IwAR2cFT_-pGKlVZ2liC-zAe3Fw0BWDlGjrrayqEGV4JuJq1_7nKoe9-TLTlA
To finalize my question, I do not know if I am creating my grammar rules correctly. I have tried my best to follow the specification in the above website, but I can't help but feel that what I am writing is completely wrong. My compiler is spitting out nothing but "warning: rule useless in grammar" for almost every (if not every) rule.
If anyone could help me out and point me in the right direction on how to make any progress, I would highly, highly appreciate it.
The decaf specification is written in (an) Extended Backus Naur Form (EBNF), which includes a number of convenience operators for repetition, optionality and grouping. These are not part of the bison/yacc syntax, which is pretty well limited to BNF. (Bison/yacc do allow the alternation operator |, but since there is no way to group subpatterns, alteration can only be used at the top-level, to combine two productions for the same non-terminal.)
The short section at the beginning of the specification which describes EBNF includes a grammar for the particular variety of EBNF that is being used. (Since this grammar is itself recursively written in the same EBNF, there is a need to apply a bit of inductive reasoning.) When it says, for example,
CommaList = "{" Expression "}+," .
it is not saying that "}+," is the peculiar spelling of a comma-repetition operator. What it is saying is that when you see something in the Decaf grammar surrounded by { and }+,, that should be interpreted as describing a comma-separated list.
For example, the Decaf grammar includes:
FieldDecl = var { identifier }+, Type ";" .
That means that a FieldDecl can be (amongst other possibilities) the token var followed by a comma-separated list of identifier tokens and then followed by a Type and finally a semicolon.
As I said, bison/yacc don't implement the EBNF operators, so you have to find an equivalent yourself. Since BNF doesn't allow any form of grouping -- and a list is a grouped subexpression -- we need to rewrite the subexpression of a production as a new non-terminal. Also, I suppose we need to use the tokens defined in spec (although bison allows a more readable syntax).
So to yacc-ify this EBNF production, we first introducing the new non-terminal and replace the token names:
FieldDecl: T_VAR IdentifierList Type T_SEMICOLON
Which leaves the definition of IdentifierList. Repetition in BNF is always produced with recursion, following a very simple model which uses two productions:
the base, which is the simplest possible repetition (usually either nothing or a single list item), and
the recursion, which describes a longer possibility by extending a shorter one.
In this case, the list must have at least one item, and we extend by adding a comma and another item:
IdentifierList
: T_ID /* base case */
| IdentifierList T_COMMA T_ID /* Recursive extension */
The point of this exercise is to develop your skills in thinking grammatically: that is, factoring out the syntax and semantics of the language. So you should try to understand the grammars presented, both for Decaf and for the author's version of EBNF, and avoid blindly copying code (including grammars). Good luck!
I've posted this on the D newsgroup some months ago, but for some reason, the answer never really convinced me, so I thought I'd ask it here.
The grammar of D is apparently context-free.
The grammar of C++, however, isn't (even without macros). (Please read this carefully!)
Now granted, I know nothing (officially) about compilers, lexers, and parsers. All I know is from what I've learned on the web.
And here is what (I believe) I have understood regarding context, in not-so-technical lingo:
The grammar of a language is context-free if and only if you can always understand the meaning (though not necessarily the exact behavior) of a given piece of its code without needing to "look" anywhere else.
Or, in even less rigor:
The grammar cannot be context-free if I need I can't tell the type of an expression just by looking at it.
So, for example, C++ fails the context-free test because the meaning of confusing<sizeof(x)>::q < 3 > (2) depends on the value of q.
So far, so good.
Now my question is: Can the same thing be said of D?
In D, hashtables can be created through a Value[Key] declaration, for example
int[string] peoplesAges; // Maps names to ages
Static arrays can be defined in a similar syntax:
int[3] ages; // Array of 3 elements
And templates can be used to make them confusing:
template Test1(T...)
{
alias int[T[0]] Test;
}
template Test2(U...)
{
alias int[U] Test2; // LGTM
}
Test1!(5) foo;
Test1!(int) bar;
Test2!(int) baz; // Guess what? It's invalid code.
This means that I cannot tell the meaning of T[0] or U just by looking at it (i.e. it could be a number, it could be a data type, or it could be a tuple of God-knows-what). I can't even tell if the expression is grammatically valid (since int[U] certainly isn't -- you can't have a hashtable with tuples as keys or values).
Any parsing tree that I attempt to make for Test would fail to make any sense (since it would need to know whether the node contains a data type versus a literal or an identifier) unless it delays the result until the value of T is known (making it context-dependent).
Given this, is D actually context-free, or am I misunderstanding the concept?
Why/why not?
Update:
I just thought I'd comment: It's really interesting to see the answers, since:
Some answers claim that C++ and D can't be context-free
Some answers claim that C++ and D are both context-free
Some answers support the claim that C++ is context-sensitive while D isn't
No one has yet claimed that C++ is context-free while D is context-sensitive :-)
I can't tell if I'm learning or getting more confused, but either way, I'm kind of glad I asked this... thanks for taking the time to answer, everyone!
Being context free is first a property of generative grammars. It means that what a non-terminal can generate will not depend on the context in which the non-terminal appears (in non context-free generative grammar, the very notion of "string generated by a given non-terminal" is in general difficult to define). This doesn't prevent the same string of symbols to be generated by two non-terminals (so for the same strings of symbols to appear in two different contexts with a different meaning) and has nothing to do with type checking.
It is common to extend the context-free definition from grammars to language by stating that a language is context-free if there is at least one context free grammar describing it.
In practice, no programming language is context-free because things like "a variable must be declared before it is used" can't be checked by a context-free grammar (they can be checked by some other kinds of grammars). This isn't bad, in practice the rules to be checked are divided in two: those you want to check with the grammar and those you check in a semantic pass (and this division also allows for better error reporting and recovery, so you sometimes want to accept more in the grammar than what would be possible in order to give your users better diagnostics).
What people mean by stating that C++ isn't context-free is that doing this division isn't possible in a convenient way (with convenient including as criteria "follows nearly the official language description" and "my parser generator tool support that kind of division"; allowing the grammar to be ambiguous and the ambiguity to be resolved by the semantic check is an relatively easy way to do the cut for C++ and follow quite will the C++ standard, but it is inconvenient when you are relying on tools which don't allow ambiguous grammars, when you have such tools, it is convenient).
I don't know enough about D to know if there is or not a convenient cut of the language rules in a context-free grammar with semantic checks, but what you show is far from proving the case there isn't.
The property of being context free is a very formal concept; you can find a definition here. Note that it applies to grammars: a language is said to be context free if there is at least one context free grammar that recognizes it. Note that there may be other grammars, possibly non context free, that recognize the same language.
Basically what it means is that the definition of a language element cannot change according to which elements surround it. By language elements I mean concepts like expressions and identifiers and not specific instances of these concepts inside programs, like a + b or count.
Let's try and build a concrete example. Consider this simple COBOL statement:
01 my-field PICTURE 9.9 VALUE 9.9.
Here I'm defining a field, i.e. a variable, which is dimensioned to hold one integral digit, the decimal point, and one decimal digit, with initial value 9.9 . A very incomplete grammar for this could be:
field-declaration ::= level-number identifier 'PICTURE' expression 'VALUE' expression '.'
expression ::= digit+ ( '.' digit+ )
Unfortunately the valid expressions that can follow PICTURE are not the same valid expressions that can follow VALUE. I could rewrite the second production in my grammar as follows:
'PICTURE' expression ::= digit+ ( '.' digit+ ) | 'A'+ | 'X'+
'VALUE' expression ::= digit+ ( '.' digit+ )
This would make my grammar context-sensitive, because expression would be a different thing according to whether it was found after 'PICTURE' or after 'VALUE'. However, as it has been pointed out, this doesn't say anything about the underlying language. A better alternative would be:
field-declaration ::= level-number identifier 'PICTURE' format 'VALUE' expression '.'
format ::= digit+ ( '.' digit+ ) | 'A'+ | 'X'+
expression ::= digit+ ( '.' digit+ )
which is context-free.
As you can see this is very different from your understanding. Consider:
a = b + c;
There is very little you can say about this statement without looking up the declarations of a,b and c, in any of the languages for which this is a valid statement, however this by itself doesn't imply that any of those languages is not context free. Probably what is confusing you is the fact that context freedom is different from ambiguity. This a simplified version of your C++ example:
a < b > (c)
This is ambiguous in that by looking at it alone you cannot tell whether this is a function template call or a boolean expression. The previous example on the other hand is not ambiguous; From the point of view of grammars it can only be interpreted as:
identifier assignment identifier binary-operator identifier semi-colon
In some cases you can resolve ambiguities by introducing context sensitivity at the grammar level. I don't think this is the case with the ambiguous example above: in this case you cannot eliminate the ambiguity without knowing whether a is a template or not. Note that when such information is not available, for instance when it depends on a specific template specialization, the language provides ways to resolve ambiguities: that is why you sometimes have to use typename to refer to certain types within templates or to use template when you call member function templates.
There are already a lot of good answers, but since you are uninformed about grammars, parsers and compilers etc, let me demonstrate this by an example.
First, the concept of grammars are quite intuitive. Imagine a set of rules:
S -> a T
T -> b G t
T -> Y d
b G -> a Y b
Y -> c
Y -> lambda (nothing)
And imagine you start with S. The capital letters are non-terminals and the small letters are terminals. This means that if you get a sentence of all terminals, you can say the grammar generated that sentence as a "word" in the language. Imagine such substitutions with the above grammar (The phrase between *phrase* is the one being replaced):
*S* -> a *T* -> a *b G* t -> a a *Y* b t -> a a b t
So, I could create aabt with this grammar.
Ok, back to main line.
Let us assume a simple language. You have numbers, two types (int and string) and variables. You can do multiplication on integers and addition on strings but not the other way around.
First thing you need, is a lexer. That is usually a regular grammar (or equal to it, a DFA, or equally a regular expression) that matches the program tokens. It is common to express them in regular expressions. In our example:
(I'm making these syntaxes up)
number: [1-9][0-9]* // One digit from 1 to 9, followed by any number
// of digits from 0-9
variable: [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z_0-9]* // You get the idea. First a-z or A-Z or _
// then as many a-z or A-Z or _ or 0-9
// this is similar to C
int: 'i' 'n' 't'
string: 's' 't' 'r' 'i' 'n' 'g'
equal: '='
plus: '+'
multiply: '*'
whitespace: (' ' or '\n' or '\t' or '\r')* // to ignore this type of token
So, now you got a regular grammar, tokenizing your input, but it understands nothing of the structure.
Then you need a parser. The parser, is usually a context free grammar. A context free grammar means, in the grammar you only have single nonterminals on the left side of grammar rules. In the example in the beginning of this answer, the rule
b G -> a Y b
makes the grammar context-sensitive because on the left you have b G and not just G. What does this mean?
Well, when you write a grammar, each of the nonterminals have a meaning. Let's write a context-free grammar for our example (| means or. As if writing many rules in the same line):
program -> statement program | lambda
statement -> declaration | executable
declaration -> int variable | string variable
executable -> variable equal expression
expression -> integer_type | string_type
integer_type -> variable multiply variable |
variable multiply number |
number multiply variable |
number multiply number
string_type -> variable plus variable
Now this grammar can accept this code:
x = 1*y
int x
string y
z = x+y
Grammatically, this code is correct. So, let's get back to what context-free means. As you can see in the example above, when you expand executable, you generate one statement of the form variable = operand operator operand without any consideration which part of code you are at. Whether the very beginning or middle, whether the variables are defined or not, or whether the types match, you don't know and you don't care.
Next, you need semantics. This is were context-sensitive grammars come into play. First, let me tell you that in reality, no one actually writes a context sensitive grammar (because parsing it is too difficult), but rather bit pieces of code that the parser calls when parsing the input (called action routines. Although this is not the only way). Formally, however, you can define all you need. For example, to make sure you define a variable before using it, instead of this
executable -> variable equal expression
you have to have something like:
declaration some_code executable -> declaration some_code variable equal expression
more complex though, to make sure the variable in declaration matches the one being calculated.
Anyway, I just wanted to give you the idea. So, all these things are context-sensitive:
Type checking
Number of arguments to function
default value to function
if member exists in obj in code: obj.member
Almost anything that's not like: missing ; or }
I hope you got an idea what are the differences (If you didn't, I'd be more than happy to explain).
So in summary:
Lexer uses a regular grammar to tokenize input
Parser uses a context-free grammar to make sure the program is in correct structure
Semantic analyzer uses a context-sensitive grammar to do type-checking, parameter matching etc etc
It is not necessarily always like that though. This just shows you how each level needs to get more powerful to be able to do more stuff. However, each of the mentioned compiler levels could in fact be more powerful.
For example, one language that I don't remember, used array subscription and function call both with parentheses and therefore it required the parser to go look up the type (context-sensitive related stuff) of the variable and determine which rule (function_call or array_substitution) to take.
If you design a language with lexer that has regular expressions that overlap, then you would need to also look up the context to determine which type of token you are matching.
To get to your question! With the example you mentioned, it is clear that the c++ grammar is not context-free. The language D, I have absolutely no idea, but you should be able to reason about it now. Think of it this way: In a context free grammar, a nonterminal can expand without taking into consideration anything, BUT the structure of the language. Similar to what you said, it expands, without "looking" anywhere else.
A familiar example would be natural languages. For example in English, you say:
sentence -> subject verb object clause
clause -> .... | lambda
Well, sentence and clause are nonterminals here. With this grammar you can create these sentences:
I go there because I want to
or
I jump you that I is air
As you can see, the second one has the correct structure, but is meaningless. As long as a context free grammar is concerned, the meaning doesn't matter. It just expands verb to whatever verb without "looking" at the rest of the sentence.
So if you think D has to at some point check how something was defined elsewhere, just to say the program is structurally correct, then its grammar is not context-free. If you isolate any part of the code and it still can say that it is structurally correct, then it is context-free.
There is a construct in D's lexer:
string ::= q" Delim1 Chars newline Delim2 "
where Delim1 and Delim2 are matching identifiers, and Chars does not contain newline Delim2.
This construct is context sensitive, therefore D's lexer grammar is context sensitive.
It's been a few years since I've worked with D's grammar much, so I can't remember all the trouble spots off the top of my head, or even if any of them make D's parser grammar context sensitive, but I believe they do not. From recall, I would say D's grammar is context free, not LL(k) for any k, and it has an obnoxious amount of ambiguity.
The grammar cannot be context-free if I need I can't tell the type of
an expression just by looking at it.
No, that's flat out wrong. The grammar cannot be context-free if you can't tell if it is an expression just by looking at it and the parser's current state (am I in a function, in a namespace, etc).
The type of an expression, however, is a semantic meaning, not syntactic, and the parser and the grammar do not give a penny about types or semantic validity or whether or not you can have tuples as values or keys in hashmaps, or if you defined that identifier before using it.
The grammar doesn't care what it means, or if that makes sense. It only cares about what it is.
To answer the question of if a programming language is context free you must first decide where to draw the line between syntax and semantics. As an extreme example, it is illegal in C for a program to use the value of some kinds of integers after they have been allowed to overflow. Clearly this can't be checked at compile time, let alone parse time:
void Fn() {
int i = INT_MAX;
FnThatMightNotReturn(); // halting problem?
i++;
if(Test(i)) printf("Weeee!\n");
}
As a less extreme example that others have pointed out, deceleration before use rules can't be enforced in a context free syntax so if you wish to keep your syntax pass context free, then that must be deferred to the next pass.
As a practical definition, I would start with the question of: Can you correctly and unambiguously determine the parse tree of all correct programs using a context free grammar and, for all incorrect programs (that the language requires be rejected), either reject them as syntactically invalid or produce a parse tree that the later passes can identify as invalid and reject?
Given that the most correct spec for the D syntax is a parser (IIRC an LL parser) I strongly suspect that it is in fact context free by the definition I suggested.
Note: the above says nothing about what grammar the language documentation or a given parser uses, only if a context free grammar exists. Also, the only full documentation on the D language is the source code of the compiler DMD.
These answers are making my head hurt.
First of all, the complications with low level languages and figuring out whether they are context-free or not, is that the language you write in is often processed in many steps.
In C++ (order may be off, but that shouldn't invalidate my point):
it has to process macros and other preprocessor stuffs
it has to interpret templates
it finally interprets your code.
Because the first step can change the context of the second step and the second step can change the context of the third step, the language YOU write in (including all of these steps) is context sensitive.
The reason people will try and defend a language (stating it is context-free) is, because the only exceptions that adds context are the traceable preprocessor statements and template calls. You only have to follow two restricted exceptions to the rules to pretend the language is context-free.
Most languages are context-sensitive overall, but most languages only have these minor exceptions to being context-free.
I have to use a parser and writer in c++, i am trying to implement the functions, however i do not understand what a token is. one of my function/operations is to check to see if there are more tokens to produce
bool Parser::hasMoreTokens()
how exactly do i go about this, please help
SO!
I am opening a text file with text in it, all words are lowercased. How do i go about checking to see if it hasmoretokens?
This is what i have
bool Parser::hasMoreTokens() {
while(source.peek()!=NULL){
return true;
}
return false;
}
Tokens are the output of lexical analysis and the input to parsing. Typically they are things like
numbers
variable names
parentheses
arithmetic operators
statement terminators
That is, roughly, the biggest things that can be unambiguously identified by code that just looks at its input one character at a time.
One note, which you should feel free to ignore if it confuses you: The boundary between lexical analysis and parsing is a little fuzzy. For instance:
Some programming languages have complex-number literals that look, say, like 2+3i or 3.2e8-17e6i. If you were parsing such a language, you could make the lexer gobble up a whole complex number and make it into a token; or you could have a simpler lexer and a more complicated parser, and make (say) 3.2e8, -, 17e6i be separate tokens; it would then be the parser's job (or even the code generator's) to notice that what it's got is really a single literal.
In some programming languages, the lexer may not be able to tell whether a given token is a variable name or a type name. (This happens in C, for instance.) But the grammar of the language may distinguish between the two, so that you'd like "variable foo" and "type name foo" to be different tokens. (This also happens in C.) In this case, it may be necessary for some information to be fed back from the parser to the lexer so that it can produce the right sort of token in each case.
So "what exactly is a token?" may not always have a perfectly well defined answer.
A token is whatever you want it to be. Traditionally (and for
good reasons), language specifications broke the analysis into
two parts: the first part broke the input stream into tokens,
and the second parsed the tokens. (Theoretically, I think you
can write any grammar in only a single level, without using
tokens—or what is the same thing, using individual
characters as tokens. I wouldn't like to see the results of
that for a language like C++, however.) But the definition of
what a token is depends entirely on the language you are
parsing: most languages, for example, treat white space as
a separator (but not Fortran); most languages will predefine
a set of punctuation/operators using punctuation characters, and
not allow these characters in symbols (but not COBOL, where
"abc-def" would be a single symbol). In some cases (including
in the C++ preprocessor), what is a token depends on context, so
you may need some feedback from the parser. (Hopefully not;
that sort of thing is for very experienced programmers.)
One thing is probably sure (unless each character is a token):
you'll have to read ahead in the stream. You typically can't
tell whether there are more tokens by just looking at a single
character. I've generally found it useful, in fact, for the
tokenizer to read a whole token at a time, and keep it until the
parser needs it. A function like hasMoreTokens would in fact
scan a complete token.
(And while I'm at it, if source is an istream:
istream::peek does not return a pointer, but an int.)
A token is the smallest unit of a programming language that has a meaning. A parenthesis (, a name foo, an integer 123, are all tokens. Reducing a text to a series of tokens is generally the first step of parsing it.
A token is usually akin to a word in sponken language. In C++, (int, float, 5.523, const) will be tokens. Is the minimal unit of text which constitutes a semantic element.
When you split a large unit (long string) into a group of sub-units (smaller strings), each of the sub-units (smaller strings) is referred to as a "token". If there are no more sub-units, then you are done parsing.
How do I tokenize a string in C++?
A token is a terminal in a grammar, a sequence of one or more symbol(s) that is defined by the sequence itself, ie it does not derive from any other production defined in the grammar.
I would like to parse a self-designed file format with a FSM-like parser in C++ (this is a teach-myself-c++-the-hard-way-by-doing-something-big-and-difficult kind of project :)). I have a tokenized string with newlines signifying the end of a euh... line. See here for an input example. All the comments will and junk is filtered out, so I have a std::string like this:
global \n { \n SOURCE_DIRS src \n HEADER_DIRS include \n SOURCES bitwise.c framing.c \n HEADERS ogg/os_types.h ogg/ogg.h \n } \n ...
Syntax explanation:
{ } are scopes, and capitalized words signify that a list of options/files is to follow.
\n are only important in a list of options/files, signifying the end of the list.
So I thought that a FSM would be simple/extensible enough for my needs/knowledge. As far as I can tell (and want my file design to be), I don't need concurrent states or anything fancy like that. Some design/implementation questions:
Should I use an enum or an abstract class + derivatives for my states? The first is probably better for small syntax, but could get ugly later, and the second is the exact opposite. I'm leaning to the first, for its simplicity. enum example and class example. EDIT: what about this suggestion for goto, I thought they were evil in C++?
When reading a list, I need to NOT ignore \n. My preferred way of using the string via stringstream, will ignore \n by default. So I need simple way of telling (the same!) stringstream to not ignore newlines when a certain state is enabled.
Will the simple enum states suffice for multi-level parsing (scopes within scopes {...{...}...}) or would that need hacky implementations?
Here's the draft states I have in mind:
upper: reads global, exe, lib+ target names...
normal: inside a scope, can read SOURCES..., create user variables...
list: adds items to a list until a newline is encountered.
Each scope will have a kind of conditional (e.g. win32:global { gcc:CFLAGS = ... }) and will need to be handled in the exact same fashion eveywhere (even in the list state, per item).
Thanks for any input.
If you have nesting scopes, then a Finite State Machine is not the right way to go, and you should look at a Context Free Grammar parser. An LL(1) parser can be written as a set of recursive funcitons, or an LALR(1) parser can be written using a parser generator such as Bison.
If you add a stack to an FSM, then you're getting into pushdown automaton territory. A nondeterministic pushdown automaton is equivalent to a context free grammar (though a deterministic pushdown automaton is strictly less powerful.) LALR(1) parser generators actually generate a deterministic pushdown automaton internally. A good compiler design textbook will cover the exact algorithm by which the pushdown automaton is constructed from the grammar. (In this way, adding a stack isn't "hacky".) This Wikipedia article also describes how to construct the LR(1) pushdown automaton from your grammar, but IMO, the article is not as clear as it could be.
If your scopes nest only finitely deep (i.e. you have the upper, normal and list levels but you don't have nested lists or nested normals), then you can use a FSM without a stack.
There are two stages to analyzing a text input stream for parsing:
Lexical Analysis: This is where your input stream is broken into lexical units. It looks at a sequence of characters and generates tokens (analagous to word in spoken or written languages). Finite state machines are very good at lexical analysis provided you've made good design decision about the lexical structure. From your data above, individal lexemes would be things like your keywords (e.g. "global"), identifiers (e.g. "bitwise", "SOURCES"), symbolic tokesn (e.g. "{" "}", ".", "/"), numeric values, escape values (e.g. "\n"), etc.
Syntactic / Grammatic Analysis: Upon generating a sequence of tokens (or perhaps while you're doing so) you need to be able to analyze the structure to determine if the sequence of tokens is consistent with your language design. You generally need some sort of parser for this, though if the language structure is not very complicated, you may be able to do it with a finite state machine instead. In general (and since you want nesting structures in your case in particular) you will need to use one of the techniques Ken Bloom describes.
So in response to your questions:
Should I use an enum or an abstract class + derivatives for my states?
I found that for small tokenizers, a matrix of state / transition values is suitable, something like next_state = state_transitions[current_state][current_input_char]. In this case, the next_state and current_state are some integer types (including possibly an enumerated type). Input errors are detected when you transition to an invalid state. The end of an token is identified based on the state identification of valid endstates with no valid transition available to another state given the next input character. If you're concerned about space, you could use a vector of maps instead. Making the states classes is possible, but I think that's probably making thing more difficult than you need.
When reading a list, I need to NOT ignore \n.
You can either create a token called "\n", or a more generalize escape token (an identifier preceded by a backslash. If you're talking about identifying line breaks in the source, then those are simply characters you need to create transitions for in your state transition matrix (be aware of the differnce between Unix and Windows line breaks, however; you could create a FSM that operates on either).
Will the simple enum states suffice for multi-level parsing (scopes within scopes {...{...}...}) or would that need hacky implementations?
This is where you will need a grammar or pushdown automaton unless you can guarantee that the nesting will not exceed a certain level. Even then, it will likely make your FSM very complex.
Here's the draft states I have in mind: ...
See my commments on lexical and grammatical analysis above.
For parsing I always try to use something already proven to work: ANTLR with ANTLRWorks which is of great help for designing and testing a grammar. You can generate code for C/C++ (and other languages) but you need to build the ANTLR runtime for those languages.
Of course if you find flex or bison easier to use you can use them too (I know that they generate only C and C++ but I may be wrong since I didn't use them for some time).
Are there any libraries or technologies(in any language) that provide a regular-expression-like tool for any sort of stream-like or list-like data(as opposed to only character strings)?
For example, suppose you were writing a parser for your pet programming language. You've already got it lexed into a list of Common Lisp objects representing the tokens.
You might use a pattern like this to parse function calls(using C-style syntax):
(pattern (:var (:class ident)) (:class left-paren)
(:optional (:var object)) (:star (:class comma) (:var :object)) (:class right-paren))
Which would bind variables for the function name and each of the function arguments(actually, it would probably be implemented so that this pattern would probably bind a variable for the function name, one for the first argument, and a list of the rest, but that's not really an important detail).
Would something like this be useful at all?
I don't know how many replies you'll receive on a subject like this, as most languages lack the sort of robust stream APIs you seem to have in mind; thus, most of the people reading this probably don't know what you're talking about.
Smalltalk is a notable exception, shipping with a rich hierarchy of Stream classes that--coupled with its Collection classes--allow you to do some pretty impressive stuff. While most Smalltalks also ship with regex support (the pure ST implementation by Vassili Bykov is a popular choice), the regex classes unfortunately are not integrated with the Stream classes in the same way the Collection classes are. This means that using streams and regexes in Smalltalk usually involves reading character strings from a stream and then testing those strings separately with regex patterns--not the sort "read next n characters up until a pattern matches," or "read next n characters matching this pattern" type of functionally you likely have in mind.
I think a powerful stream API coupled with powerful regex support would be great. However, I think you'd have trouble generalizing about different stream types. A read stream on a character string would pose few difficulties, but file and TCP streams would have their own exceptions and latencies that you would have to handle gracefully.
Try looking at scala.util.regexp, both the API documentation, and the code example at http://scala.sygneca.com/code/automata. I think would allow a computational linguist to match strings of words by looking for part of speech patterns, for example.
This is the principle behind most syntactic parsers, which operate in two phases. The first phase is the lexer, where identifiers, language keywords, and other special characters (arithmetic operators, braces, etc) are identified and split into Token objects that typically have a numeric field indicating the type of the lexeme, and optionally another field indicating the text of the lexeme.
In the second phase, a syntactic parser operates on the Token objects, matching them by magic number alone, to parse phrases. (Software for doing this includes Antlr, yacc/bison, Scala's cala.util.parsing.combinator.syntactical library, and plenty of others). The two phases don't entirely have to depend on each other -- you can get your Token objects from anywhere else that you like. The magic number aspect seems to be important, though, because the magic numbers are assigned to constants, and they're what make it easy to express your grammar in a readable language.
And remember, that anything you can accomplish with a regular expression can also be accomplished with a context-free grammar (usually just as easily).