Robust multilingual parsing using island grammars
Nikita Synytskyy, James R. Cordy, Thomas Roy Dean · 2003
Any attempt at automated software analysis or modification must be preceded by a comprehension step, i.e. parsing. This task, while often considered straightforward, can in fact be made very challenging depending on the source code in question. Files that make up web applications serve as an example of such difficult-to-parse artifacts, for two reasons. Firstly, these files routinely contain several programming languages at once, sometimes with widely varying syntaxes, and intermingled at the statement level. Secondly, the code routinely contains syntax errors. Understanding such files calls for a robust parser that can handle multiple languages simultaneously.