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FliPpr: A System for Deriving Parsers from Pretty-Printers

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Abstract

When implementing a programming language, we often write a parser and a pretty-printer. However, manually writing both programs is not only tedious but also error-prone; it may happen that a pretty-printed result is not correctly parsed. In this paper, we propose FliPpr, which is a program transformation system that uses program inversion to produce a CFG parser from a pretty-printer. This novel approach has the advantages of fine-grained control over pretty-printing, and easy reuse of existing efficient pretty-printer and parser implementations.

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Notes

  1. The Syn system [7] is capable of handling non-contextual layouts, which can be seen as a limited form of prettiness.

  2. In this paper, we write “space” for the space character and write “whitespace” for the space character and the new line character. Other kinds of spaces such as horizontal tabs are not discussed as they do not yield new insight.

  3. Available at https://bitbucket.org/kztk/flippr/.

  4. To also make strings such as " 1-1" parsable, we can add a declaration \(f~x = \textit{nil} \mathbin {{\texttt {<>}}}\textit{ppr}~x \mathbin {{\texttt {<>}}}\textit{nil}\). However, this addition does not give any new insight, and is omitted for simplicity.

  5. https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/.

  6. https://www.haskell.org/happy/.

  7. As a slight difference, the original paper [35] uses transformations on parse trees (or more precisely, derivation trees of productions), instead of semantic actions.

  8. Because of the linearity, Wadler’s deforestation [51] and (positive) supercompilation [47] coincide for the surface language FliPpr. In addition, notice that we assume non-deterministic pattern-matching and thus need not convey negative information in the deforestation process. Thus, generalized partial computation (GPC) [18, 19] also coincide with the above two for FliPpr [46].

  9. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/wl-pprint.

  10. Strictly speaking, program inversion and inverse computation are different notions; the former is a transformation to yield an inverse program while the latter is an interpretation method to run a program in an inverse way. The difference between the two become rather unimportant for grammar-based inversion that produces grammars with additional transformations, as whether we transform (as parser generators) or interpret (as the most of parser combinators) the grammars is left for the later process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tohoku University, 6-3-09, Aza Aoba, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi, 980-8579, Japan

    Kazutaka Matsuda

  2. University of Bristol, Merchant Venturers Building, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK

    Meng Wang

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  1. Kazutaka Matsuda
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  2. Meng Wang
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Correspondence to Kazutaka Matsuda.

Additional information

This work was mainly done when the K. Matsuda was at University of Tokyo, and the M. Wang was at Chalmers University of Technology. We thank Nils Anders Danielsson for his critical yet constructive comments on an earlier version of this work, without which the surface language probably would not exist. We also thank Janis Voigtländer and Akimasa Morihata for their insightful comments on deforestation. This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant numbers 24700020, 15K15966, and 15H02681. Part of this research was done when the K. Matsuda was visiting Chalmers University of Technology supported by Study Program at the Overseas Universities by Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo.

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Matsuda, K., Wang, M. FliPpr: A System for Deriving Parsers from Pretty-Printers. New Gener. Comput. 36, 173–202 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-018-0033-7

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