[Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of BNF Parser Generator

[bsod]

A package was submitted to savannah.gnu.org.
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Bert van der Weerd <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: BNF Parser Generator
System name: bnf
This package does NOT want to apply for inclusion in the GNU project

The BNF project was concieved some 10 years ago by Han Leusheus and 
implemented by me, Bert van der Weerd (address@hidden).  BNF is a 
parser-generator that takes a BNF-style syntax and generates a \\\"C\\\" parser 
for 
that syntax. Ofcourse we know of the existence of flex and bison, and 
i\\\'ve used these two, but BNF is more
lightweight and more direct to use. It can generate both file i/o based 
parsers and string i/o based parsers.
The BNF program is a simple commandline tool, and uses gnu coding 
standards for both the commandline parsing and the ./configure;make install 
paradigm.
What is missing at the moment is documentation. For that i\\\'ll probably 
use \\\'screen\\\' as an example as it has good documentation.

Han Leushuis is already looking at some theoretical improvements to the 
program, for example the use of variables in the grammar. I would like 
to implement multi-language output, more specific: Perl and C.
an example expression in BNF would be:
 expr =  \\\'(\\\' expr \\\')\\\' | num \\\'*\\\' num | num \\\'/\\\' num | num 
\\\'+\\\'  num | 
            num \\\'-\\\' num | \\\'-\\\' num;
or; to produce output:

expr = { \\\'foo\\\' `bar` | . } ;

where all \\\'foo\\\' is replaced by bar, and the dot matches (and echos) 
any character. 

Ideas that we want to implement:
  $var = \\\'(\\\' expr \\\')\\\' ;
  expr = $var | num (\\\'*\\\' | \\\'/\\\' | \\\'+\\\' | \\\'-\\\') num | 
\\\'-\\\' num;
which demonstrates the proposed use of variables.

This program is *not* a replacement of bison/flex, but is can and has 
been succesfully used in some lightweight applications. We would like to 
take it all a step further and become a nice cool GNU project.

It already exists and you can see it at:

        http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsod/bnf-1.6.4.tar.gz

This program is partly written in BNF itself, ofcourse;)