[antlr-interest] Again Cobol:
Mark Taylor
mttdgf at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 05:38:38 PDT 2009
I'm working on a Cobol grammar (oh, the foolishness of youth... wait I'm
not THAT young...) and I need some advice about the ambiguities. In
particular I'm getting the famous: "error(211): CobolTest.g:11:30: [fatal]
rule if has non-LL(*) decision due to recursive rule invocations reachable
from alts 1,2. Resolve by left-factoring or using syntactic predicates or
using backtrack=true option." Yes, this has come up before, but there was
no clear answer. This time I have a specific example (see below).
Below is the smallest grammar which exhibits the problem. You can see I
have stmt+ in both the IF rule and the PERFORM rule. The problem is the
'END-IF'?. Since END-IF is optional in Cobol, there is no clear scope
terminator. I've tried left refactoring the (stmt+ ....) into a separate
rule for both IF and PERFORM but that doesn't seem to work either. I don't
see how a syntactic predicate could be applied to this either.
If I were writing this as a recursive descent parser by hand (I'm trying
Antlr so I don't have to do this) I would write a statementlist() method
that would simply loop on all statement beginnings keywords. Then when an
END-IF, ELSE, END-PERFORM, or some other arbitrary scope terminator appeared
in the input the loop would simple exit and return the list of valid
statements. The question is: how to get Antlr to behave like this?
Any advice is appreciated.
<pre>
grammar CobolTest;
program: sentence+ EOF;
sentence: stmt+ '.' ;
stmt: if
| move
| perform ;
if: 'if' condition 'then'? stmt+ ('else' stmt+)? 'end-if'? ;
move: 'move' ID 'to' ID ;
perform: 'perform' stmt+ 'end-perform' ;
condition: ID '==' ID ;
ID : ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z')+ ;
INT : '0'..'9'+ ;
NEWLINE: '\r'? '\n' {skip();} ;
WS : (' '|'\t')+ {skip();} ;
</pre>
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