# Junk Drawer

For all those little papers scattered across your desk

# Announcing the release of loner!

07 Apr 2019 in Blog and Code

I am pleased to announce the release of version 0.1.0 of loner! You can find its online documentation at Junk Drawer/loner, with a link to the online API reference.

## What is it?

Loner aims to be a scala API and DSL for EBNF grammars. To explain those acronyms:

## What does it do?

In short, it allows you to write code like (making use of implicits):

val grammar = Grammar(
'A ::= "abc".? || 'B,
'B ::= 'C.*,
'C ::= "c" ~ 'A
)


Which is equivalent to parsing the following grammar:

# A is an abc or a B
<A> ::= ["abc"]
| <B> ;
# B is 0-or-more Cs
<B> ::= {<C>} ;
# C is a c followed by an A
<C> ::= c<A> ;


Which loner can do for you! From scala,

val grammar = EbnfParser(
"""
# A is an abc or a B
<A> ::= ["abc"]
| <B> ;
# B is 0-or-more Cs
<B> ::= {<C>} ;
# C is a c followed by an A
<C> ::= c<A> ;
"""
)


Finally, this first version provides a command line tool named ebnf that can format such input (called ebnf files), stripping out the comments and produce a machine-consumable output.

The aim is to eventually feed this into a loner tool that verifies that the grammar is LL(1) compliant, a subject for another day.

## Why is this needed?

First, playing with languages is fun.

Second, the modern programmer will eventually find him/herself in need of a mini-language, and want to write a grammar for it. Having a common way to do so improves communication and creates an opportunity for new tools that operate on these grammars (e.g., verify that a string is in the language, or manipulate the grammar to try and reduce it, or generate random strings in its language, or any number of other concepts: imagine allowing users to embed a language in your next game just by writing a grammar specification and a mapping from constructs to actions).

Third, the LL(1) property of context-free languages is important to development tools for mini-languages, like the venerable yacc. Being able to readily verify from the start that your language conforms is a time-saver; being able to feed this input to a tool which could generated a yacc skeleton would be a great boon.

## How?

loner’s first step was to build a model of a Grammar object. A grammar is naturally a sequence of productions, each of which is a nonterminal symbol and a rule (or expression).

The expressions naturally model as an abstract syntax tree, something scala’s case classes express readily. That, combined with their ability to give DSL-like syntax as above, and my desire to implement a serious project in scala, combined to make this project a reality.

To create the parser, loner makes use of scala’s amazing parser combinator library to derive a set of functional parsers for the components of the grammar, each of which maps a part of the ebnf file into domain level objects above.

To be sure, this was not easy: scala’s RegexParsers do not handle left-recursion natively, forcing me to thing about how to stratify a grammar (that, incidentally, described a language of grammars… how very meta). Adding support for comments proved equally tricky, and loner does not (yet) support a quoting or escape mechanism to embed special characters in non-terminals and terminals. I also had to get over the hurdles of working with sbt and its many oddities.

Finally, the Grammar objects provide a format method that does the work of prettifying the grammar for output.

Loner employs a TDD-style development process, making use of ScalaTest to express high-level expectations.

## Future?

As stated above, work is underway to develop a loner tool to verify the LL(1) property of a grammar. This was the impetus for the project, as the algorithm to verify this property is expressed so mathematically that it seemed naturally a good fit for a language like scala.

## How can I help?

Use the code! Read it, help improve the documentation, report bugs, etc.

Dive in to our issue tracker, and see if there’s something you can help with (pesky escape characters…).

Write more tests (we’ll never have perfect coverage).

I would love someone to contribute a vim-plugin for .ebnf files, complete with filetype-detection, syntax highlighting, and support for ebnf as the indent program. It’s on my todo-list.

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