Software visualization of LR parsing and synthesized attribute evaluation

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth L. White; Jeffrey Ruby; Laura Denise Deddens

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 390 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-0644
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-024x(199901)29:1<1::aid-spe216>3.0.co;2-n

✦ Synopsis

Visual YACC is a tool that automatically creates visualizations of the YACC LR parsing process and synthesized attribute computation. The Visual YACC tool works by instrumenting a standard YACC grammar with graphics calls that draw the appropriate data structures given the current actions by the parser. The new grammar is processed by the YACC tools and the resulting parser displays the parse stack and parse tree for every step of the parsing process of a given input string.

Visual YACC was initially designed to be used in compiler construction courses to supplement the teaching of parsing and syntax directed evaluation. We have also found it to be useful in the difficult task of debugging YACC grammars. In this paper, we describe this tool and how it is used in both contexts. We also detail two different implementations of this tool: one that produces a parser written in C with calls to Motif; and a second implementation that generates Java source code.