Breaking parsers: mutation-based generation of programs with guaranteed syntax errors

Raselimo, Moeketsi; Taljaard, Jan; Fischer, Bernd

doi:10.1145/3357766.3359542

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…We took some files from repositories benchmarking JSON parsers and produced random invalid files by word mutations [24]. More precisely, we randomly deleted some (maximum 10) symbols ] , } , : and , in the corresponding file.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A semantic framework for PEGs

Medeiros

Olarte

2020

Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering

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Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) are a recognition-based formalism which allows to describe the syntactical and the lexical elements of a language. The main difference between Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and PEGs relies on the interpretation of the choice operator: while the CFGs' unordered choice | ′ is interpreted as the union of the languages recognized by and ′ , the PEGs' prioritized choice / ′ discards ′ if succeeds. Such subtle, but important difference, changes the language recognized and yields more efficient parsing algorithms. This paper proposes a rewriting logic semantics for PEGs. We start with a rewrite theory giving meaning to the usual constructs in PEGs. Later, we show that cuts, a mechanism for controlling backtracks in PEGs, finds also a natural representation in our framework. We generalize such mechanism, allowing for both local and global cuts with a precise, unified and formal semantics. Hence, our work strives at better understanding and controlling backtracks in parsers for PEGs. The semantics we propose is executable and, besides being a parser with modest efficiency, it can be used as a playground to test different optimization ideas. More importantly, it is a mathematical tool that can be used for different analyses.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also foresee to use the symbolic traces to generate positive and negative cases for a grammar [24]. It is also worth exploring if the symbolic semantics in §B can be useful for proving language equivalence on restricted fragments of PEGs (such problem is undecidable in general [8]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%