Programming Languages

Parsing with First-Class Derivatives

by Jonathan Brachthäuser, Tillmann Rendel, and Klaus Ostermann

In Proc. Int’l Conf. Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA). ACM Press, 2016.

Abstract

Brzozowski derivatives, well known in the context of regular expressions, have recently been rediscovered to give a simplified explanation to parsers of context-free languages. We add derivatives as a novel first-class feature to a standard parser combinator language. First- class derivatives enable an inversion of the control flow, allowing to implement modular parsers for languages that previously required separate pre-processing steps or cross- cutting modifications of the parsers. We show that our framework offers new opportunities for reuse and supports a modular definition of interesting use cases of layout-sensitive parsing.

News

Presentation at OOPSLA conference

Jonathan Brachthäuser
Alumni
Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser
presents the paper Parsing with First-Class Derivatives at the International Conference on Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The paper is joint work with Tillmann Rendel
Alumni
Tillmann Rendel
and Klaus Ostermann
Head
Klaus Ostermann
.

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