Eclipse Community Forums: TMF (Xtext) » Customizing actions in rules

Help

Home

Home » Modeling » TMF (Xtext) » Customizing actions in rules

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator

Customizing actions in rules [message #958732]

Fri, 26 October 2012 07:12

Markus Wolf

Messages: 153
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi there,

I would like to know if it is possible to customize the code/grammar of a rule at runtime?
What I need is "Automatic Semicolon Insertion" as declared in the ECMA5 specification in chapter 7.9.
In short it means that if there is an offending next token which could not be matched and e.g. the next char (maybe hidden token) is a newline, then insert a semicolon and continue parsing.

This is hard to achieve I think. I already tried to mark my explicit semicolons as optional but this is no easy solution. Even with a semantic predicate my grammar gets ambiguous.

Can anyone help me?

Report message to a moderator

Re: Customizing actions in rules [message #959190 is a reply to message #958732]

Fri, 26 October 2012 14:18

Henrik Lindberg

Messages: 2509
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

On 2012-26-10 9:12, Markus Wolf wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I would like to know if it is possible to customize the code/grammar of
> a rule at runtime?
> What I need is "Automatic Semicolon Insertion" as declared in the ECMA5
> specification in chapter 7.9.
> In short it means that if there is an offending next token which could
> not be matched and e.g. the next char (maybe hidden token) is a newline,
> then insert a semicolon and continue parsing.
>
> This is hard to achieve I think. I already tried to mark my explicit
> semicolons as optional but this is no easy solution. Even with a
> semantic predicate my grammar gets ambiguous.
>
> Can anyone help me?

There is no easy solution. You can't modify the grammar dynamically -
there is lots of code that has been generated.

The right approach is to make those keywords optional in the grammar.
I even do that for things that are required to be there, but I then
validate it instead of giving the user a syntax error - this because the
user often gets very confusing errors because of this problem.

I offer a quick fix for it.
In the serializer, if there is no node model, I emit the optional keyword.

The most difficult is to handle the ambiguities in your language. There
is no easy fix to that. You have to follow the rules of left-factoring
(look at expression based languages), use semantic predicates, and as a
last resort turn on backtracking.

You can take a look at cloudsmith / geppetto @ gitghub - it has a quite
forgiving grammar where semantics are checked in the validator.

One other alternative I can think of is if it is possible to detect the
missing tokens in the lexer, in that case, and external lexer can emit
something like IMPLIED_COMMA token. This is more difficult as you do not
have the semantic scope available - only the text sequence.

Regards
- henrik

Report message to a moderator