A parsing library and tool with the essential features of MARPA, encoded in pure Swift.
In particular, like MARPA, Lotsawa:
- Parses any LR-regular grammar in linear time.
- Parses some non-LR-regular grammars in linear time.
- Produces the parse forests for any CFG.
Lotsawa owes almost everything of value to MARPA and its author, Jeffrey Kegler, for uncovering the thread of progress in parsing technology, gathering it together into one group of algorithms, proving important properties about them, and contributing some key innovations. This project exists primarily because MARPA is missing functionality needed by the Hylo language implementation.
Secondary reasons Lotsawa might be useful:
- Lotsawa supports high-level usage from a safe, statically-typed language that compiles to efficient native code.
- Lotsawa has a simple build/installation process and no dependencies other than Swift.
- Lotsawa encodes the grammar analysis and recognition algorithms with a relatively small amount of high-level code; it may serve as a better reference for understanding the technology than either the highly theoretical Marpa paper or from libmarpa's C implementation, which must be extracted from a CWeb document.
- Lotsawa can be used to precompile a grammar into static tables, eliminating some initial startup cost.
- Lotsawa uses pure Mutable Value Semantics, thus eliminating many possible sources of bugs, including data races.