A sentence generator for testing parsers

During the past decades, the complexity of compilers has grown much and so has the importance of testing them. Compiler is essentially a software tool, and hence its testing should fulfill all the software testing criteria. Testing is the process of finding errors in an application by executing it. It is one of the essential and most time consuming phases of software development. Hence a lot of effort is directed to fully automate this process, making it more reliable, repeatable , less time consumi g, less boring, and less expensive. Test cases for compiler should be generated so that they cover all possible valid and invalid input conditions. One of the major problems in generating test cases is the completeness of coverage, and the potentially unfeasible size of the generated test data. The test data for compilers should ideally cover all the syntax and semantic rules of t e language in all possible combinations and in all possible contexts.

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“…Purdom's algorithm generates small sentences efficiently with the goal to use each production rule at least once [29].…”

Section: A Brief Survey Of Test Cases Generation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The algorithm was designed by Purdom [29] in 1972 and only a very high-level logic in imperative style description was given. In the original description it is not clear when the algorithm is to stop generating sentences or how the two main routines, the parsing and the referee routine, communicate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Grammars For Top-Down Parsers

Paracha

Franěk

2009

Innovations and Advances in Computer Sciences and Engineering

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“…The fundamental work in this field is the paper [2]. Later, it was used as a departure point by many other researchers, who either modified the Purdom algorithm suggested in this work or compared it with their own algorithms.…”

Section: Testing Of Syntax Analyzermentioning

confidence: 95%

Survey of compiler testing methods

Kossatchev

Posypkin

2005

Program Comput Soft

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Compilers are used for creating executable modules for programs written in high-level languages; therefore, the presence of errors in a compiler is a serious danger for the quality of the software developed with the use of this compiler. As in the case of any other software, testing is one of the most important methods of quality control and error detection in compilers. The survey is devoted to methods for generating, running, and checking the quality of compiler test suites, which are based on formal specifications of the programming language syntax and semantics.

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“…Coverage criteria for grammars has been studied in [6] where a family of test criteria for CFGs is described and analyzed. There are also algorithms for automatic sentence generation such as Purdom's algorithm [12] and its extension [14]. We do not discuss deeply about the details of these techniques.…”

Section: Not Acceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the implementation, we adopted Earley's algorithm [1] for sentence recognition, Purdom's algorithm [12] for sentence generation and Lämmel's context-dependent rule coverage [5] for coverage analysis. We have not implemented any algorithm for ambiguity detection but simply resorted to Bison by checking the shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts reported by it.…”

Section: Experimental Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Framework for Grammar Testing

Zheng¹,

Chen²

2009

2009 Eighth IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science

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Grammars, especially context-free grammars, are widely used within and even outside the field of computer science. In this paper, we present a systematic framework for grammar testing, in which some commonly used techniques for testing programs such as module testing and integration testing are adapted and applied to the testing of grammars. We propose a nonterminal-based approach for grammar modularization, combined with an iterative process for grammar testing in which a grammar is tested with respect to both a generator and a recognizer. Experiments on grammars for some non-trivial programming languages such as C and Java demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the testing framework and the proposed approaches.

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A sentence generator for testing parsers

Cited by 142 publications

References 4 publications

Testing Grammars For Top-Down Parsers

Testing Grammars For Top-Down Parsers

Survey of compiler testing methods

A Systematic Framework for Grammar Testing

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