CSci 4607 Computer Language Processing

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Resources for CSci 4607 Computer Language Processing

On this page you will find:

General little languages resources
Some examples of little languages
lex, yacc and related creatures
XML resources
XML and little languages
C resources
Thoughts about "import" statement

This list will grow as the course progresses. Your suggestions are welcome.

General little languages resources

A Little Languages Wiki page at Cunningham and Cunningham, Inc. examines the issue of how powerful little languages are (in particular, whether they are Turing complete).
Another page on definitions and issues related to little languages.

lex, yacc and related creatures

The Lex & Yacc Page from combo.org.

Some examples of little languages

AWK is a record-processing languages with C-like syntax. It is a special-purpose language (thus it satisfies one of main criteria for a "little" language), but it has too many statements to be definitely considered a "little" language.
AMPL (developed at Bell Labs) is a language for optimization and mathematical programming (both are methods for solving mathematical problems, have nothing to do with programming in CS sense). Check out examples and on-line test page.

XML resources

Some XML resources in no particular order:

O'Reilly's XML.com: XML, XSLT, XPath www.xml.com. Answers to many questions about XML and related products.
xml.apache.org xml.apache.org. Apache projects related to XML, including some ongoing projects. By the way, they are looking for volunteers.
A detailed XML Tutorial with lots of examples.
XML Magazine. The latest in XML technology.

C resources

comp.lang.c Frequently Asked Questions (organized by topics, good debugging resource).
Programming in C by David Marshall (lecture notes, examples). In particular, detailed notes on:
There is also a search by keyword option.
Overview of makefiles.

Thoughts about "import" statement

In the language implementation we have encountered the following issue: should an "import" statement (as in import myfile) be a statement in the language and therefore be handled by yacc/bison, or a preprocessor directive and therefore be handled by flex. In the latter case it may be possible that the parser is not aware that the import directive has been issued at all and views the tokens from the new file as a continuation of the program, or flex may send a token to the parser indicating that the source of tokens has changed, followed by another token when the end of the file has been reached and the tokens are now coming from the standard input.

Here is an article that examines similar issues in building a compiler for processing IDLs (interface definition of components). It points out an important aspect of the issue: if an imported file has a global variable, should this variable name be resolved in the new program environment? Other interesting aspects of the proposed solution are multiple paths through the program code and creation of a new parser to process the imported file.