Imprecise manipulation of source code (semi-parsing) is useful for tasks such as robust parsing, error recovery, lexical analysis, and rapid development of parsers for data extraction. An island grammar precisely defines only a subset of a language syntax (islands), while the rest of the syntax (water) is defined imprecisely. Usually water is defined as the negation of islands. Albeit simple, such a definition of water is naive and impedes composition of islands. When developing an island grammar, sooner or later a language engineer has to create water tailored to each individual island. Such an approach is fragile, because water can change with any change of a grammar. It is time-consuming, because water is defined manually by an engineer and not automatically. Finally, an island surrounded by water cannot be reused because water has to be defined for every grammar individually. In this paper we propose a new technique of island parsing-bounded seas. Bounded seas are composable, robust, reusable and easy to use because island-specific water is created automatically. Our work focuses on applications of island parsing to data extraction from source code. We have integrated bounded seas into a parser combinator framework as a demonstration of their composability and reusability.
Parser combinators offer a universal and flexible approach to parsing. They follow the structure of an underlying grammar, are modular, well-structured, easy to maintain, and can recognize a large variety of languages including context-sensitive ones. However, these advantages introduce a noticeable performance overhead mainly because the same powerful parsing algorithm is used to recognize even simple languages. Time-wise, parser combinators cannot compete with parsers generated by well-performing parser generators or optimized handwritten code. Techniques exist to achieve a linear asymptotic performance of parser combinators, yet there is a significant constant multiplier. The multiplier can be lowered to some degree, but this requires advanced meta-programming techniques, such as staging or macros, that depend heavily on the underlying language technology. In this work we present a language-agnostic solution. We optimize the performance of parsing combinators with specializations of parsing strategies. For each combinator, we analyze the language parsed by the combinator and choose the most efficient parsing strategy. By adapting a parsing strategy for different parser combinators we achieve performance comparable to that of handwritten or optimized parsers while preserving the advantages of parsers combinators.
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