Due Date: Mon 14 NovPair ProjectObjectives
DescriptionYour job is to build an interactive interpreter for a simple imperative language with nested records. SyntaxPlease look at the sample test cases linked below to get an idea of the concrete syntax of our mini-language. The grammar for this syntax is as follows; keywords and symbols are indicated in bold.
Your job is to implement a parser for this concrete syntax that constructs suitable abstract syntax trees. (It is our job as a group to iron out any bugs in this grammar, such as left-recursion!) SemanticsSemantics refers to the meaning of a document in a language, such as a program. We distinguish between static semantics (compile-time type checking, other kinds of validation) and dynamic (= runtime) semantics. In this simple language, we do not have explicit compile-time type information, but there are other kinds of validation we can explore, e.g., ensuring that the left side of an assignment is a proper l-value (something we can assign to, such as a standalone variable or a member variable of a struct). Because our language is a fragment of C, very loosely speaking, we can informally define the semantics of our language as "whatever the program would do if we treated it as a C program". It is also possible to provide a formal definition of the semantics of our language: imperative structs But we will keep this discussion largely informal and go into more detail in class. In particular, in following C tradition, an assignment evaluates to the assigned value (r-value); in following functional language tradition, a sequence evaluates to its last value and a while loop evaluates to nothing. Your job is to implement a simple static validator and a complete interpreter. Static ValidatorThe purpose of this validator is to check the sanity of some aspects of a program in this language without actually executing the program. In particular, the validator ensures that
As you notice, this validator is not perfect (because it allows selections) but catches some of the cases that would otherwise lead to errors. You should come up with at least two additional test cases for the validator. Runtime RepresentationThe interpreter will rely on certain runtime constructs.
REPLOnce you have a working parser, validator, and interpreter, exposing these as a REPL is easy: Repeatedly prompt for input strings until you see the interactive termination character (in our case, a semicolon). Parse the resulting concatenation, validate it, interpret it, and print the result, if any. Special commands for the REPL include
Nonfunctional Requirements
Submission
|