Hand in your solutions to this practical before lunch time on your next practical day, correctly packaged in a transparent folder with your cover sheets. Unpackaged and late submissions will not be accepted - you have been warned. Please do NOT come to a practical and spend the first hour printing or completing solutions from the previous week's exercises. Since the practical will have been done on a group basis, please hand in one copy of the cover sheet for each member of the group. These will be returned to you in due course, signed by the marker. Please make it clear whose folder you have used for the electronic submission, for example g03A1234. Lastly, please resist the temptation to carve up the practical, with each group member only doing one task. The group experience is best when you discuss each task together.
In this practical you are to
You will need this prac sheet and your text book. As usual, copies of the prac sheet are also available at http://www.cs.ru.ac.za/courses/CSc301/Translators/trans.htm .
When you have completed this practical you should understand
This week you are required to hand in, besides the cover sheet:
I do NOT require listings of any Java or C# code produced by Coco/R.
Keep the prac sheet and your solutions until the end of the semester. Check carefully that your mark has been entered into the Departmental Records.
You are referred to the rules for practical submission which are clearly stated in our Departmental Handbook. However, for this course pracs must be posted in the "hand-in" box outside the laboratory and not given to demonstrators.
A rule not stated there, but which should be obvious, is that you are not allowed to hand in another group's or student's work as your own. Attempts to do this will result in (at best) a mark of zero and (at worst) severe disciplinary action and the loss of your DP. You are allowed - even encouraged - to work and study with other students, but if you do this you are asked to acknowledge that you have done so. You are expected to be familiar with the University Policy on Plagiarism, which you can consult by following the links at:
http://www.scifac.ru.ac.za/ or from http://www.ru.ac.za/
There are several files that you need, zipped up this week in the file PRAC3.ZIP (Java version) or PRAC3C.ZIP (C# version).
j:
md prac3
cd prac3
copy i:\csc301\trans\prac3.zip (Java) or prac3c.zip (C#)
unzip prac3.zip
You will find the executable version of Coco/R and batch files for running it, frame files, and various sample programs and grammars, contained in files with extensions like
*.ATG, *.PAV, *.TXT *.BAD
In the kit you will find Calc.atg. This is essentially the calculator grammar on page 106 of the text, with a slight (cosmetic) change of name.
Use Coco/R to generate a parser for data for this calculator. You do this most simply by giving the command
cmake Calc
The primary name of the file (Calc) is case sensitive. Note that the .ATG extension is needed, but not given in the command. Used like this, Coco/R will simply generate three important components of a calculator program - the parser, scanner, and main driver program. Cocol specifications can be programmed to generate a complete calculator too (ie one that will evaluate the expressions, rather than simply check them for syntactic correctness), but that will have to wait for the early hours of another day.
(Wow! Have you ever written a program so fast in your life before?)
Of course, having Coco/R write you a program is one thing. But it might also be fun and interesting to run the generated program and see what it is capable of doing.
A command like
crun Calc calc.txt
will run the program Calc and try to parse the file calc.txt, sending error messages to the screen. Giving the command in the form
crun Calc calc.bad -L
will send an error listing to the file listing.txt, which might be more convenient. Try this out.
Well, you did all that. Well done. What next?
For some light relief and interest you might like to look at the code the system generated for you (three .java files are created in a subdirectory Calc (Java) or the parent directory (C#) - you don't have to comment this week, simply gaze in awe. Don't take too long over this, because now you have the chance to be more creative.
That's right - we have not finished yet. Modify the grammar so that you can use parentheses in your expressions, allow leading unary + or - signs, can raise quantities to a "power" (as in 12^2 + 5^6, meaning 122 + 56) and also give the calculator a square-root capability (as in 4 + sqrt(5 * 12)). Oh, and while you are at it. allow it to recognize numbers that incorporate a decimal point, as in 3.4 or 3. or .45
Of course, the application does not have any real "calculator" capability - it cannot calculate anything (yet). It only has the ability to recognise or reject expressions at this stage. Try it out with some expressions that use the new features, and some that use them incorrectly.
Warning. Language design and grammar design is easy to get wrong. Think hard about these problems.
Develop a Cocol grammar that will describe a list of the names of staff who have optional titles, first names and/or initials, surnames, and (usually) qualifications, for example (Staff.txt):
R. J. Foss, BSc, MSc, PhD.
Professor Philip Machanick, PhD.
Professor P. D. Terry, MSc, PhD.
George Clifford Wells, BSc(Hons), MSc, PhD.
Greg G. Foster, PhD.
James Connan, MSc.
Ms Michelle Coupe.
Dr Karen Lee Bradshaw, MSc, PhD.
Mrs Mici Halse, MSc.
C. Hubert H. Parry, BMus.
Professor Hannah Thinyane, BA, BSc, PhD.
Dr Barry V. W. Irwin, PhD.
Miss Busi Mzangwa.
Hint: notice the rather critical placing of commas and periods in this file. The exercise is partly one of being able to define tokens sensibly. Try to do this realistically so far as names are concerned, and limit yourself to a few examples of qualifications only.
Parva really is a horrid little language, isn't it? But its simplicity means that it is easy to devise Terry Torture on the lines of "extend it".
In the prac kit you will find the grammar for the first level of Parva, taken from page 164. Generate a program from this that will recognise or reject simple Parva programs, and verify that the program behaves correctly with two of the sample programs in the kit, namely VOTER.PAV and VOTER.BAD.
cmake Parva
crun Parva voter.pav
crun Parva voter.bad -L
Now modify the grammar to add various features. Specifically, add (and check that the additions work):
Here are some silly examples of code that should give you some ideas. Maybe try them - but test your system on some correct source code and on some deliberately incorrect code. Please note that in this course I have a nasty habit on occasions of giving you sample data that is sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect, as compilers have to be able to deal with both kinds.
void main () {
// (not supposed to do anything useful!)
int i = 1, k = 0;
while (i < 10) {
do {
k = k + 1;
if (k > 5) break;
} while (k < i);
i = i + 1;
}
repeat
read(k);
write(i, i * k);
until (k == 100);
for (i = 1; i <= 10; i += 2) write(i);
for i in ( 3, 5, 7, k, 2 * k ) write(i);
} // main
void main () {
// (not supposed to do anything useful!)
int i = 0, j = 8;
char ch;
for (ch = 'z' ; ch >= 'a'; ch--) {
write(ch);;;;
write(char(ch + 4), int(ch), i + j * ch);
}
} // main
void main () {
// (not supposed to do anything useful!)
int age;
bool been_Kissed;
read("How old are you, and have you been kissed? ", age, been_Kissed);
if (age == 16) {
write("sweet sixteen");
if (! been_Kissed) write(" and never been kissed");
}
else
if (age == 21) {
write("party time!");
int headache = 0, strain = 0;
for (beers = 20; beers > 0; beers--) {
strain++; ++headache;
if (strain % 8 == 0) {
write("That\'s better"); strain = 0;
}
}
}
elseif (age > 21 && age < 40)
write("over the hill, bru");
elseif (age > 70)
write("take a new lover");
else
write("boring");
} // main
These little programs and some other like them are in the kit, and you can easily write some more of your own.
Note: Read that phrase again: "that should give you some ideas". And again. And again. Don't just rush in and write a grammar that will recognise only some restricted forms of statement. Think hard about what sorts of things you can see there, and think hard about how you could make your grammar fairly general.
Hint: All we require at this stage is the ability to describe these features. You do not have to try to give them any semantic meaning or write code to allow you to use them in any way. In later pracs we might try to do that, but please stick to what is asked for this time, and don't go being over ambitious.
In the prac kit you will find an extract from the index to the next edition of my all-time bestseller "Hacking out a Degree", in the file Index.txt. It looks something like this:
abstract class 12, 45
abstraction, data 165
advantages of Java and Modula-2 1-99, 100-500, Appendix 4
aegrotat examinations -- see unethical doctors
aggregate pass, chances of 0
class attendance, intolerable 15, 745
class members 31
deadlines, compiler course -- see sunrise
horrible design (C and C++) 34, 45, 56-80
lectures, missed 1, 3, 5-9, 12, 14-17, 21-25, 28
loss of DP certificate 2014
no chance of supp 2014
prac tests 10, 25, 27, 30
probable exclusion from Rhodes 2015
recursion -- see recursion
senility, onset of 21-24, 105
subminimum 40
supplementary exams (first courses only) 45 - 49
wasted years 2011 - 2014
Develop a grammar Index.atg that describes this and similar indexes (indices?) and create a program that will analyse an index and accept or reject it (syntactically). Answer this as far as possible in the sprit in which it is intended - clearly a real index could have almost any combinations of characters making up tokens, so restrict yourself to permitting relatively simple words and numbers that might come between between punctuation marks.
For ease of use with the Java file and directory naming conventions, please
Make sure that the grammar includes the "pragma" $CN. The COMPILER line of your grammar description should always read something like
COMPILER Gram $CN
It is easy enough to configure a copy of UltraEdit to incorporate the option to invoke Coco/R. Use the Advanced ->; Tool Configuration pull down, and set up an option to read as in the example below
If the Coco/R generation process succeeds, the Java compiler is invoked automatically to try to compile the application. If this does not succeed, a Java compiler error listing is redirected to the file ERRORS, where it can be viewed easily by opening the file in UltraEdit.
You can run either the Java or C# version of Coco/R in free standing mode with a command like:
cmake Gram
Like that, error messages are a little cryptic. In the form
cmake Gram -options m
the system will produce you a listing of the grammar file and the associated error messages, if any, in the file LISTING.TXT. If the Coco/R generation process, succeeds the Java compiler is invoked automatically to try to compile the application. If that compilation does not succeed, a Java compiler error listing is redirected to the file ERRORS, where it can be viewed easily by opening the file in your favourite editor.
Error checking by Coco/R takes place in various stages. The first of these relates to simple syntactic errors - like leaving off a period at the end of a production. These are usually easily fixed. The second stage consists of ensuring that all non-terminals have been defined with right hand sides, that all non-terminals are "reachable", that there are no cyclic productions, no useless productions, and in particular that the productions satisfy what are known as LL(1) constraints. We shall discuss LL(1) constraints in class in the next week, and so for this practical we shall simply hope that they do not become tiresome. The most common way of violating the LL(1) constraints is to have alternatives for a nonterminal that start with the same piece of string. This means that a so- called LL(1) parser (which is what Coco/R generates for you) cannot easily decide which alternative to take - and in fact will run the risk of going badly astray. Here is an example of a rule that violates the LL(1) constraints:
assignment = variableName ":=" expression
| variableName index ":=" expression.
index = "[" subscript "]" .
Both alternatives for assignment start with a variableName. However, we can easily write production rules that do not have this problem:
assignment = variableName [ index ] ":=" expression .
index = "[" subscript "]" .
A moment's thought will show that the various expression grammars that are discussed in the text in chapter 6 - the left recursive rules like
expression = term | expression "-" term .
also violate the LL(1) constraints, and so have to be recast as
expression = term { "-" term } .
to get around the problem.
For the moment, if you encounter LL(1) problems, please speak to the long suffering demonstrators, who will hopefully be able to help you resolve all (or most) of them.