[Grammatica-users] Easier lexer generation.

[Matti Katila]

Hi!

I have been lurking around compiler compilers for a week and found
grammatica from many others (sablecc, runcc, antlr, javacc, yacc to name a
few). Grammatica seems to be well coded, LL and free.

My problem is that I would like to have more elegant lexer to easier
grammar construction. Ok, let me give you some examples to help you
understand what am I talking about:

Python - http://docs.python.org/ref/lexical.html
Scheme R5RS - http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r5rs_9.html#SEC73
Haskell - http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/syntax-iso.html
Java - http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/lexical.html#29542

What I'm looking for is that many of these lexical syntaxes use ebnf
grammar to describe lexer. As I have mainly understood from the examples
of grammatica it doesn't support ebnf for lexer yet. Am I right?

And another question is: how grammatica supports ambiguities in the
grammar, e.g., to use it to parse c++ or perl source which is known to
have ambiguity?

Yeah, that was all for now.


   -Matti