pkgsrc/devel/py-ply/DESCR
2015-12-02 18:22:10 +00:00

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PLY is a 100% Python implementation of the common parsing tools lex and yacc.
Here are a few highlights:
- PLY is very closely modeled after traditional lex/yacc. If you know how to
use these tools in C, you will find PLY to be similar.
- PLY provides *very* extensive error reporting and diagnostic information to
assist in parser construction. The original implementation was developed
for instructional purposes. As a result, the system tries to identify the
most common types of errors made by novice users.
- PLY provides full support for empty productions, error recovery, precedence
specifiers, and moderately ambiguous grammars.
- Parsing is based on LR-parsing which is fast, memory efficient, better
suited to large grammars, and which has a number of nice properties when
dealing with syntax errors and other parsing problems. Currently, PLY builds
its parsing tables using the LALR(1) algorithm used in yacc.
- PLY uses Python introspection features to build lexers and parsers. This
greatly simplifies the task of parser construction since it reduces the
number of files and eliminates the need to run a separate lex/yacc tool
before running your program.
- PLY can be used to build parsers for "real" programming languages. Although
it is not ultra-fast due to its Python implementation, PLY can be used to
parse grammars consisting of several hundred rules (as might be found for a
language like C). The lexer and LR parser are also reasonably efficient
when parsing typically sized programs. People have used PLY to build
parsers for C, C++, ADA, and other real programming languages.