What is the best way to build a parser in c# to parse my own language?
Ideally I’d like to provide a grammar, and get Abstract Syntax Trees as an output.
Many thanks,
Nestor
What is the best way to build a parser in c# to parse my
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
What is the best way to build a parser in c# to parse my own language?
Ideally I’d like to provide a grammar, and get Abstract Syntax Trees as an output.
Many thanks,
Nestor
I’ve had good experience with ANTLR v3. By far the biggest benefit is that it lets you write LL(*) parsers with infinite lookahead – these can be quite suboptimal, but the grammar can be written in the most straightforward and natural way with no need to refactor to work around parser limitations, and parser performance is often not a big deal (I hope you aren’t writing a C++ compiler), especially in learning projects.
It also provides pretty good means of constructing meaningful ASTs without need to write any code – for every grammar production, you indicate the “crucial” token or sub-production, and that becomes a tree node. Or you can write a tree production.
Have a look at the following ANTLR grammars (listed here in order of increasing complexity) to get a gist of how it looks and feels