The Development of a Parser for SDL - 2000.
Michael Schmitt · 2000
In November 1999, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has adopted the latest release of the Specification and Description Language. SDL-2000 introduces a lot of new features and generalizes existing concepts. Because of its many changes, there is a strong demand for completely redesigned software tools. The first step in the development chain of any SDL tool is the construction of a parser which builds an abstract syntax tree. However, even though SDL-2000 comes along with a complete set of grammars, it is not possible to simply put the grammar rules into one of the existing compiler construction tools. Instead, much effort has to be spent on transforming them into an appropriate input format and resolving conflicts. This report reflects the development of a parser for SDL-2000 which is based on the ANTLR compiler generator and whose source code is freely available.