The next 700 data description languages

FisherKathleen,; MandelbaumYitzhak,; WalkerDavid,

doi:10.1145/1111320.1111039

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(14 reference statements)

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“…PADS [7], PacketTypes [10], and DataScript [1] are projects that facilitate working with data formats. PacketTypes lets programmers specify the layout of network packets using a declarative language.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Nita

Grossman

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract.Portable low-level C programs must often support multiple equivalent in-memory layouts of data, due to the byte or bit order of the compiler, architecture, or external data formats. Code that makes assumptions about data layout often consists of multiple highly similar pieces of code, each designed to handle a different layout. Writing and maintaining this code is difficult and bug-prone: Because the differences among data layouts are subtle, implicit, and inherently low-level, it is difficult to understand or change the highly similar pieces of code consistently.We have developed a small extension for C that lets programmers write concise declarative descriptions of how different layouts of the same data relate to each other. Programmers then write code assuming only one layout and rely on our translation to generate code for the others. In this work, we describe our declarative language for specifying data layouts, how we perform the automatic translation of C code to equivalent code assuming a different layout, and our success in applying our approach to simplify the code base of some widely available software.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Nita

Grossman

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…PADS (Fisher et al [2006]) tries to lessen the development effort needed for the processing of "ad-hoc data", therefore focusing less on the formal aspects (e.g. correctness) of the problem.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generic packet descriptions: verified parsing and pretty printing of low-level data

Geest

Swierstra

2017

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development

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Complex protocols describing the communication or storage of binary data are difficult to describe precisely. This paper presents a collection of data types for describing a binary data formats; the corresponding parser and pretty printer are generated automatically from a data description. By embedding these data types in a general purpose dependently typed programming language, we can verify once and for all that the parsers and pretty printers generated in this style are correct by construction. To validate our results, we show how to write a verified parser of the IPv4 network protocol.

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“…We learned about the importance of these compositionality properties from our experience with the PADS family of languages [7,8,22]. PADS is a domain-specific language that interprets specialized type declarations as grammars.…”

Section: Yakker By Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics and algorithms for data-dependent grammars

2010

Self Cite

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Traditional parser generation technologies are incapable of handling the demands of modern programmers. In this paper, we present the design and theory of a new parsing engine, YAKKER, capable of handling the requirements of modern applications including (1) full scannerless context-free grammars with (2) regular expressions as right-hand sides for defining nonterminals. YAKKER also includes (3) facilities for binding variables to intermediate parse results and (4) using such bindings within arbitrary constraints to control parsing. These facilities allow the kind of data-dependent parsing commonly needed in systems applications, particularly those that operate over binary data. In addition, (5) nonterminals may be parameterized by arbitrary values, which gives the system good modularity and abstraction properties in the presence of data-dependent parsing. Finally, (6) legacy parsing libraries, such as sophisticated libraries for dates and times, may be directly incorporated into parser specifications. We illustrate the importance and utility of this rich format specification language by presenting its use on examples ranging from difficult programming language grammars to web server logs to binary data specification. We also show that our grammars have important compositionality properties and explain why such properties are important in modern applications such as automatic grammar induction.In terms of technical contributions, we provide a traditional high-level semantics for our new grammar formalization and show how to compile these grammars into nondeterministic automata. These automata are stack-based, somewhat like conventional pushdown automata, but are also equipped with environments to track data-dependent parsing state. We prove the correctness of our translation of data-dependent grammars into these new automata and then show how to implement the automata efficiently using a variation of Earley's parsing algorithm.

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The next 700 data description languages

Cited by 15 publications

References 21 publications

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Generic packet descriptions: verified parsing and pretty printing of low-level data

Semantics and algorithms for data-dependent grammars

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