Exploiting metrics to facilitate grammar transformation into LALR format
Proceedings of the 2001 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Applying software engineering techniques to parser design: the development of a C# parser
SAICSIT '02 Proceedings of the 2002 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology
Decorating tokens to facilitate recognition of ambiguous language constructs
Software—Practice & Experience
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Recent advances in software engineering have produced a variety of well-established approaches, formalisms and techniques to facilitate the construction of large-scale applications. Developers interested in the construction of robust, extensible software that is easy to maintain should expect to deploy a range of these techniques, as appropriate to the task.In this paper, we provide a foundation for the application of established software metrics to the measurement of context-free grammars. The usual application of software metrics is to program code; we provide a mapping that allows these metrics to be applied to grammars. This allows us to interpret six software engineering metrics in a grammatical context, including McCabe's complexity metric and Fenton's impurity metric.We have designed and implemented a tool to automatically compute the six metrics; as a case study, we use these six metrics to measure some of the properties of grammars for the Oberon, ISO C, ISO C++ and Java programming languages. We believe that the techniques that we have developed can be applied to estimating the difficulty of designing, implementing, testing and maintaining parsers for large grammars.