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The History of PCCTS
The Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set
Terence Parr
Parr Research Corporation
Minneapolis, Minnesota
and
University of Minnesota
Army High Performance Computing Research Center
[Updated 8-7-94]
The PCCTS project began as a parser-generator project for a gra-
duate course at Purdue University in the Fall of 1988 taught by Hank
Dietz- translator-writing systems. Under the guidance of Professor
Dietz, the parser generator, ANTLR (originally called YUCC), continued
after the termination of the course and eventually became the subject
of Terence Parr's Master's thesis. Originally, lexical analysis was
performed via ALX which was soon replaced by Will Cohen's DLG in the
Fall of 1989 (DFA-based lexical-analyzer generator, also an offshoot
of the graduate translation course).
The alpha version of ANTLR was totally rewritten resulting in
1.00B. Version 1.00B was released via an internet newsgroup
(comp.compilers) posting in February of 1990 and quickly gathered a
large following. 1.00B generated only LL(1) parsers, but allowed the
merged description of lexical and syntactic analysis. It had rudimen-
tary attribute handling similar to that of YACC and did not incor-
porate rule parameters or return values; downward inheritance was very
awkward. 1.00B-generated parsers terminated upon the first syntax
error. Lexical classes (modes) were not allowed and DLG did not have
an interactive mode.
Upon starting his Ph.D. at Purdue in the Fall of 1990, Terence
Parr began the second total rewrite of ANTLR. The method by which
grammars may be practically analyzed to generate LL(k) lookahead
information was discovered in August of 1990 just before his return.
Version 1.00 incorporated this algorithm and included the AST mechan-
ism, lexical classes, error classes, and automatic error recovery;
code quality and portability were higher. In February of 1992 1.00
was released via an article in SIGPLAN Notices. Peter Dahl, Ph.D.
candidate, and Professor Matt O'Keefe (both at the University of Min-
nesota) tested this version extensively. Dana Hoggatt (Micro Data
Base Systems, Inc.) came up with the idea of error grouping (strings
attached to non-terminals) and tested 1.00 heavily.
Version 1.06 was released in December 1992 and represented a
large feature enhancement over 1.00. For example, rudimentary seman-
tic predicates were introduced, error messages were significantly
improved for k>1 lookahead and ANTLR parsers could indicate that loo-
kahead fetches were to occur only when necessary for the parse
Page 1
PCCTS
(normally, the lookahead "pipe" was constantly full). Russell Quong
joined the project in the Spring of 1992 to aid in the semantic predi-
cate design. Beginning and advanced tutorials were created and
released as well. A makefile generator was included that sets up
dependencies and such correctly for ANTLR and DLG. Very few 1.00
incompatibilities were introduced (1.00 was quite different from 1.00B
in some areas).
1.10 was released on August 31, 1993 and incorporated bug fixes,
a few feature enhancements and a major new capability - an arbitrary
lookahead operator (syntactic predicate), (alpha)?beta. This feature
was co-designed with Professor Russell Quong also at Purdue. To sup-
port infinite lookahead, a preprocessor flag, ZZINF_LOOK, was created
that forced the ANTLR() macro to tokenize all input prior to parsing.
Hence, at any moment, an action or predicate can see the entire input
sentence. The predicate mechanism of 1.06 was extended to allow mul-
tiple predicates to be hoisted; the syntactic context of a predicate
was also moved along with the predicate.
In February of 1994, SORCERER (a simple tree-parser generator)
was released. This tool allows the user to parse child-sibling trees
by specifying a grammar rather than building a recursive-descent tree
walker by hand. Work towards a library of tree transformations is
underway. Aaron Sawdey at The University of Minnesota became a second
author of SORCERER after the initial release.
On April 1, 1994, PCCTS 1.20 was released. This was the first
version to actively support C++ output. It also included important
fixes regarding semantic predicates and (..)+ subrules. This version
also introduced token classes, the "not" operator, and token ranges.
On June 19, 1994, SORCERER 1.00B9 was released. Gary Funck of
Intrepid Technology joined the SORCERER team and provided very valu-
able suggestions regarding the "transform" mode of SORCERER.
On August 8, 1994, PCCTS 1.21 was released. It mainly cleaned up
the C++ output and included a number of bug fixes.
From the 1.21 release forward, the maintenance and support of all
PCCTS tools will be primarily provided by Parr Research Corporation,
Minneapolis MN---an organization founded on the principles of excel-
lence in research and integrity in business; we are devoted to provid-
ing really cool software tools. Please see file PCCTS.FUTURE for more
information. All PCCTS tools currently in the public domain will con-
tinue to be in the public domain.
Looking towards the future, a graphical user-interface is in the
design phase. This would allow users to view the syntax diagram
representation of their grammars and would highlight nondeterministic
productions. Parsing can be traced graphically as well. This system
will be built using a multiplatform window library. We also antici-
pate the introduction of a sophisticated error handling mechanism
called "parser exception handling" in a near future release.
Page 2
PCCTS
Currently, PCCTS is used at over 1000 known academic, government,
and commercial sites in 37 countries. Of course, the true number of
users is unknown due to the large number of ftp sites.
Credits
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
|ANTLR 1.00A Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
|ALX Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
|ANTLR 1.00B Terence Parr Hank Dietz, Will Cohen |
|DLG 1.00B Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
|NFA Relabelling Will Cohen |
|LL(k) analysis Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
|ANTLR 1.00 Terence Parr Hank Dietz, Will Cohen |
|DLG 1.00 Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
|ANTLR 1.06 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong, Hank Dietz|
|DLG 1.06 Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
|ANTLR 1.10 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong |
|ANTLR 1.20 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong |
|ANTLR 1.21 Terence Parr Russell Quong |
|DLG 1.10 Will Cohen Terence Parr |
|DLG 1.20 Will Cohen Terence Parr |
|DLG 1.21 Terence Parr |
|Semantic predicates Terence Parr Russell Quonq |
|Syntactic predicates Terence Parr Russell Quonq |
|SORCERER 1.00A Terence Parr |
|SORCERER 1.00B Terence Parr Aaron Sawdey |
|SORCERER 1.00B9 Terence Parr Aaron Sawdey, Gary Funck |
|___________________________________________________________________________|
Page 3