Before Starting

An objective of CS 236 is to help you write complex programs by using mathematical concepts as the basis for solving real world problems through computation. Mathematical thinking leads to programs that are clear, organized, and verifiably correct. This first project shows you how discrete math structures form the basis not only for writing the code, but for the code itself. It thus also provides a clear guide to maintaining and extending the code by any other programmer who also understands the discrete math structures.

You are expected to write code from scratch that clearly emulates the discrete math structures on which the solution is built. You are expected to justify your design and your code as one that is maintainable and extendable by other programmers who understand and are conversant with discrete mathematical structures. You should also learn that for complex programs, if you hack the code or formulate your code without using the discrete math structures, it will take you longer to write, and it is less likely to be correct.

Please be aware that the project standards apply to this project and all projects in this course, and in particular for this project, you may not use a regular expression library. As a reminder, the project standards do define a strict time-bound on pass-off.

Description

A lexical analyzer groups characters in an input stream into tokens. A token is a sequence of one or more characters that form a single element of a language (e.g., a symbol, a numerical value, a string literal, or a keyword).

The project is to write a lexical analyzer for a subset of the Datalog language. The Lexer should output the UNDEFINED token if an undefined symbol is found. The input to your Lexer is a text file and the output is a print-out of formatted tokens explained below. Please refer to the project standards for details on how to indicate the program input and where the output should be directed.

A token object is comprised of:

  • a string - extracted from the file text
  • a number - the line the token started on
  • a token type - listed below

The lexical analyzer must use finite state machines to recognize tokens in the input streams. It is recommended that you consider using enumerated types to enumerate the potential states of the machine.

Token Types

You are to generate tokens from a text input stream for a subset of Datalog. The list of all token types that you will be expected to identify is below. You need to define the token types in your code.

Token Type Description Examples
COMMA The ',' character ,
PERIOD The '.' character .
Q_MARK The '?' character ?
LEFT_PAREN The '(' character (
RIGHT_PAREN The ')' character )
COLON The ':' character :
COLON_DASH The string “:-” :-
MULTIPLY The '*' character *
ADD The '+' character +
SCHEMES The string “Schemes” Schemes
FACTS The string “Facts” Facts
RULES The string “Rules” Rules
QUERIES The string “Queries” Queries
ID A letter followed by 0 or more letters or digits. Keywords (Schemes, Facts, Rules, Queries) have precedence over IDs in the lexical analysis. valid invalid
Identifier1 1stPerson
Person Person_Name
Schemes
STRING Any sequence of characters enclosed in single quotes. Two single quotes denote an apostrophe within the string. For line-number counts, count all \n's within a string. A string token’s line number is the line where the string starts. If EOF is found before the end of the string, it is undefined (see UNDEFINED token below). 'This is a string'
' ' (The empty string)
'this isn''t two strings'
COMMENT A line comment starts with # and ends at the next newline or EOF. # This is a comment
A block comment starts with a #| and ends with a |#. They can be empty and multiple block comments can appear on the same line. The comment's line number is the line where the comment started. Like STRING, if EOF is found before the end of the block comment, it is UNDEFINED (see UNDEFINED token below). #||#
#| This is a tricky
multiline comment |#
#| This is an illegal block comment
because it ends with EOF
WHITESPACE Any character recognized by the isspace() function defined in ctype.h. Though we give it a token type here, these tokens will be ignored and not saved. Be sure to count the line numbers when skipping over white space.
UNDEFINED Any character not tokenized as a string, keyword, identifier, symbol, or white space is undefined. Additionally, any non-terminating string or non-terminating block comment is undefined. In both of the latter cases we reach EOF before finding the end of the string or the end of the block comment. $&^ (Three undefined tokens)
'any string that does not end
EOF End of input file

Output Format

For this and all subsequent labs, you MUST match the formatting requirements exactly. Automated testing systems are used to check your code (similar to those used by professional software design companies) and it is desired that you experience writing code that matches a given protocol.

The expected output is the representation of a token, printed one per line, followed by a single line that states how many tokens there were. You should NOT print any information for a WHITESPACE token. Format tokens as follows:

(Token_Type,"Value",Line_Number)
Notice there are no spaces on either side of the commas separating the three token's elements. The token type should appear in this list, spelled exactly as specified (all capital letters). The text is the value of the token surrounded by double quotes. You should have only one token per line, and the last line should look like:
Total Tokens = ###
where ### is replaced by the number of tokens found (excluding whitespace). ALL OUTPUT IS CASE SENSITIVE. See the example below:

Example 1

For input (the line numbers are not part of the input–they are to help clarify new lines)

01 .
02 ,
03 'a string'
04 #A comment
05 Schemes
06 FactsRules
07 ::-
08

The Lexer should output

 (PERIOD,".",1)
 (COMMA,",",2)
 (STRING,"'a string'",3)
 (COMMENT,"#A comment",4)
 (SCHEMES,"Schemes",5)
 (ID,"FactsRules",6)
 (COLON,":",7)
 (COLON_DASH,":-",7)
 (EOF,"",8)
 Total Tokens = 9

Example 2

Input

01 Queries:
02 IsInRoomAtDH('Snoopy',R,'M',H)
03 #SchemesFactsRules<
04 .
05 #|comment >=
06 wow|#
07

Output

(QUERIES,"Queries",1)
(COLON,":",1)
(ID,"IsInRoomAtDH",2)
(LEFT_PAREN,"(",2)
(STRING,"'Snoopy'",2)
(COMMA,",",2)
(ID,"R",2)
(COMMA,",",2)
(STRING,"'M'",2)
(COMMA,",",2)
(ID,"H",2)
(RIGHT_PAREN,")",2)
(COMMENT,"#SchemesFactsRules<",3)
(PERIOD,".",4)
(COMMENT,"#|comment >=
wow|#",5)
(EOF,"",7)
Total Tokens = 16

Example 3

Input

01 Queries:
02 IsInRoomAtDH('Snoopy',R,'M'H)?
03 Rules Facts Schemes
04 &@Queries
05 :
06 'hello
07 I am' $ A 'this has a
08 Return
09 The end''s near
10

Output

(QUERIES,"Queries",1)
(COLON,":",1)
(ID,"IsInRoomAtDH",2)
(LEFT_PAREN,"(",2)
(STRING,"'Snoopy'",2)
(COMMA,",",2)
(ID,"R",2)
(COMMA,",",2)
(STRING,"'M'",2)
(ID,"H",2)
(RIGHT_PAREN,")",2)
(Q_MARK,"?",2)
(RULES,"Rules",3)
(FACTS,"Facts",3)
(SCHEMES,"Schemes",3)
(UNDEFINED,"&",4)
(UNDEFINED,"@",4)
(QUERIES,"Queries",4)
(COLON,":",5)
(STRING,"'hello
I am'",6)
(UNDEFINED,"$",7)
(ID,"A",7)
(UNDEFINED,"'this has a
Return
The end''s near
",7)
(EOF,"",10)
Total Tokens = 24

FAQ

What is going on with EOF and multiple definitions?

Do not define objects, classes, enumerated types, constants, etc. named EOF. EOF is an existing macro in stdio to indicate end-of-file. If it is redefined, then all kinds of strange behavior ensues from compilation to run time errors. Use a different name for EOF when defining token types for this project (e.g., MYEOF).

What is an empty string, and how is it related to the escape sequence for an apostrophe?

Consider the following input:

'''bob'
' ''bob'
'' 'bob'

The output should be:

(STRING,"'''bob'",1)
(STRING,"' ''bob'",2)
(STRING,"''",3)
(STRING,"'bob'",3)
(EOF,"",4)
Total Tokens = 5

Any automaton, not just the string automaton, should read as many characters as it can. It only decides to accept or reject once it is no longer able to read characters. The first two examples illustrate this point. Rather than calling the first two instances of a single-quote an empty string or a string with a single space, the automaton continued reading characters until the string closed.

The third example is different. Here, the second single-quote was followed by a white-space, which the string automaton is not able to read at that point (the apostrophe escape sequence must not be separated by a space), so in this case, it reads the empty string.

How do I implement an automaton in C++?

The most direct solution is to use methods. For example, consider an automaton to detect the string “hi”.

bool h() {
  if (s.getChar() = 'h')
     return i();
  return false;
}
 
bool i() {
   if (s.getChar() = 'i')
     return true;
   return false;
}

In this example, s.getChar() returns the next character in the input. This behavior is not part of some standard library; it is just pseudo-code to use in this example.

How do I handle DOS end-of-line (EOL) encoding?

DOS encodes EOL as '\r' followed by '\n'. The '\r' means carriage return. What happens when you output that to the console is that the cursor moves to the beginning of the line and starts output at that spot. If you develop in Windows, then any test file you create will have DOS EOL encoding. It doesn't matter for WHITESPACE since '\r' is considered WHITESPACE; however, it most likely will affect the LINECOMMENT machine. Most likely, the machine is designed to end comments with the '\n' character, which means the machine will include the '\r' character as part of the line comment. When the machine goes to output the string for the LINECOMMENT token to the console, it will move to the beginning of the line and begin overwriting the text. Here is an example of what that looks like.

",1)MENT,"#   |line comment1
Notice that the closing quotes are at the beginning of the line with the line number and closing paren. It is an easy fix to the LINECOMMENT machine to correctly terminate on either encoding and not include that pesky '\r' character.

Submission

Review the project standards for creating a zip archive. Your submission cannot be scored if you fail to create the archive correctly.

Navigate to Learning Suite, select 'CS 236', and click on 'Assignments' on the course home page. Click on the link to the relevant project and at the bottom of the description click on 'View/Submit'. Use the resulting upload dialog to upload your zip archive.

Pass-off

Pass-off your project directly to a TA during normal TA hours after your archive is uploaded to learningsuite. TAs help students on a first-come/first-serve basis and are under no obligation to stay later than designated hours so plan accordingly. Please review the syllabus for the pass-off requirements.

cs-236/lexical-analyzer.txt · Last modified: 2018/09/05 13:30 by pdiddy
Back to top
CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
chimeric.de = chi`s home Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki do yourself a favour and use a real browser - get firefox!! Recent changes RSS feed Valid XHTML 1.0