The Grammar Tool Box: A Case Study Comparing GLR Parsing Algorithms
Adrian Johnstone, Elizabeth A. Scott, Giorgios Economopoulos · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2004
The Grammar Tool Box is a toolset for manipulating Context Free Grammars and objects associated with them such as parsers, languages and derivations. GTB has three main rôles: as a pedagogic tool; as an experimental platform for novel algorithms and representations; and as a production tool for translator front end generation. In this paper we give an overview of GTB and its companion Java-based animator tool PAT. We illustrate the use of the toolset in the construction of a comparative study of three variants of the Tomita-style GLR parsing algorithm running on LR(0), SLR(1) and LR(1) tables for ANSI-C, ISO-Pascal and IBM VS-COBOL, and give results showing the size of the structures constructed by these parsers and the amount of searching required during the parse, which abstracts their runtime.