September 8, 2006
Announcing : PLY-2.0 (Python Lex-Yacc)
http://www.dabeaz.com/ply
I'm pleased to announce a significant new update to PLY---a 100% Python
implementation of the common parsing tools lex and yacc. PLY-2.0
features
a completely new implementation of LALR(1) parsing that provides a
significant speedup when generating the underlying parsing tables. This
new implementation also (hopefully) fixes all outstanding bugs in LALR
(1)
parsing that were reported for previous versions of PLY-1.x.
Here are a few PLY highlights:
- PLY is closely modeled after traditional lex/yacc. If you know
how
to use these or similar tools in other languages, you will find
PLY to be comparable.
- PLY provides very extensive error reporting and diagnostic
information to assist in parser construction. The original
implementation was developed for instructional purposes. As
a result, the system tries to identify the most common types
of errors made by novice users.
- PLY provides full support for empty productions, error recovery,
precedence rules, and moderately ambiguous grammars.
- Parsing is based on LR-parsing which is fast, memory efficient,
better suited to large grammars, and which has a number of nice
properties when dealing with syntax errors and other parsing
problems. Currently, PLY can build its parsing tables using
either SLR or LALR(1) algorithms.
- PLY can be used to build parsers for large programming languages.
Although it is not ultra-fast due to its Python implementation,
PLY can be used to parse grammars consisting of several hundred
rules (as might be found for a language like C). The lexer and LR
parser are also reasonably efficient when parsing normal
sized programs.
More information about PLY can be obtained on the PLY webpage at:
http://www.dabeaz.com/ply
PLY is freely available and is licensed under the terms of the Lesser
GNU Public License (LGPL).
Cheers,
David Beazley (http://www.dabeaz.com)
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