Design Patterns for Parsing [1]
Where: SIGCSE 2005
When: February 27, 2005
We provide a systematic transformation of an LL(1) grammar to an object model that consists of
- an object structure representing the non-terminal symbols and their corresponding grammar production rules,
- a union of classes representing the terminal symbols (tokens).
We present a variant form of the visitor pattern and apply it to the above union of token classes to model a predictive recursive descent parser on the given grammar. Parsing a non-terminal is represented by a visitor to the tokens. For non-terminals that have more than one production rule, the corresponding visitors are chained together according to the chain of responsibility pattern in order to be processed correctly by a valid token. The abstract factory pattern, where each concrete factory corresponds to a non-terminal symbol, is used to manufacture appropriate parsing visitors.
Our object-oriented formulation for predictive recursive descent parsing eliminates the traditional construction of the predictive parsing table and yields a parser that is declarative and has minimal conditionals. It not only serves to teach standard techniques in parsing but also as a non-trivial exercise of object modeling for objects-first introductory courses.
