Section: Software

Keywords : parser, consistency verification, validation, natural semantics.

CLF -Computer Language Factory

Participant : Thierry Despeyroux [ correspondant ] .

The initial goal of the Computer Language Factory (CLF) was to enhance the trilogy of formalisms Metal/PPML/Typol used in Centaur [76] to support prototyping the syntax and the semantics of computer languages. The Centaur system was a syntactic editor, written in Lisp, and was able to call external modules as parsers or semantic tools that was specified using specific formalisms. However, with the premature end of the development of the Centaur sytem, this goal was not completely achieved.

The current version of CLF has been rebuilt to permit a fast and easy developpement of efficient parsers in Prolog, including XML parsers. It currently contains a couple of tools. The first one uses flex to perform lexical analysis and the second is an extension of Prolog DCGs [80] , [104] , [75] to perfom syntactical analysis.

This toolbox has been used to produce a parser for XML. This parser has been extended to produce a specification formalism. The generated parsers have been intensively used in our team to parse and analyse XML files, mainly related to our research applied to the Inria annual activity reports (cf. section  6.5.1 ).

A complete documentation is valaible in [63] .