A Language Specification Tool for Model-Based Parsing

Typically, formal languages are described by providing a textual BNF-like notation specification, which is then manually annotated for syntax-directed translation. When the use of an explicit model is required, its implementation requires the development of the conversion steps between the model and the grammar, and between the parse tree and the model instance. Whenever the language specification is modified, the developer has to manually propagate changes throughout the entire language processor pipeline. These updates are time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. Besides, in the case that different applications use the same language, the developer has to maintain several copies of the same language specification. In this paper, we introduce a model-based parser generator that decouples language specification from language processing, hence avoiding many of the problems caused by grammar-driven parsers and parser generators.