Bounded Seas: Island Parsing Without Shipwrecks

Kurs, Jan; Lungu, Mircea; Nierstrasz, Oscar (2014). Bounded Seas: Island Parsing Without Shipwrecks. In: Combemale, Benoî; Pearce, David J.; Barais, Olivier; Vinju, Jurgen J. (eds.) Software Language Engineering. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Vol. 8706 (pp. 62-81). Springer International Publishing 10.1007/978-3-319-11245-9_4

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Imprecise manipulation of source code (semi-parsing) is useful for tasks such as robust parsing, error recovery, lexical analysis, and rapid development of parsers for data extraction. An island grammar precisely defines only a subset of a language syntax (islands), while the rest of the syntax (water) is defined imprecisely. Usually, water is defined as the negation of islands. Albeit simple, such a definition of water is naive and impedes composition of islands. When developing an island grammar, sooner or later a programmer has to create water tailored to each individual island. Such an approach is fragile, however, because water can change with any change of a grammar. It is time-consuming, because water is defined manually by a programmer and not automatically. Finally, an island surrounded by water cannot be reused because water has to be defined for every grammar individually. In this paper we propose a new technique of island parsing - bounded seas. Bounded seas are composable, robust, reusable and easy to use because island-specific water is created automatically. We integrated bounded seas into a parser combinator framework as a demonstration of their composability and reusability.

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