Objective-C Parser (Front End)
The Objective-C parser (front end) enables the construction of Objective-C custom compilers, analysis tools, or source transformation tools. It is a member of SD's family of language front ends, based on first-class infrastructure (DMS) for implementing such custom tools. The Objective-C front end includes:
- Lexical analysis including ASCII, ISO 8859-1, UTF-8 and 16, and Japanese Shift-JIS
- Conversion of literal values (numbers, escaped strings) into native values to enable easy computation over literal values
- String literals represented internally in Unicode to support 16-bit characters
- Explicit grammar directly implements defacto and real standards and extensions
- Objective-C v1 based on full ISO 9899:1990 (ANSI "C") syntax
- Objective-C v2 based on full GCC4 syntax including C99 (ISO 9899:1999) support
- Preprocessor support
- Controllable include directory paths
- Option to fully expand preprocessor directives
- Option to parse include files for definitions
- Option to parse preserving preprocessor conditional directives, macros and include directives
- Automatic construction of complete abstract syntax tree
- Capture of comments and formats (shape) of literal values
- Capture of ambiguous parses during parsing
- Ability to parse large systems of files into same workspace, enabling interprocedural and cross-file analysis/transformation
- Ability to parse different languages into same workspace, enabling cross-language analysis/transformation
- Facilities to process syntax trees
- Complete procedural API to visit/query/update/construct/print syntax trees
- Source regeneration by prettyprinting and/or fidelity printing of syntax trees with comments and lexical formats
- Automatically generated source-to-source transformation system
- Ability to define custom attribute-grammar-based analyzers
- Available as source code to enable complete customization
- Means to manage multiple language dialects with highly shared common core
- Robustness due to careful testing and application across many customers
Many of these facilities come as a consistent consequence of the front end being built on top of DMS.
Here are some sample tools (many offered by SD as products) built using the Objective-C front end:
Your organization may use DMS with the Objective-C front end to implement and deploy your own custom tools. The sample tools can be obtained in source form as part of the Objective-C front end for customization. Semantic Designs is also willing to build custom tools under contract.
