Evaluating GLR parsing algorithms

  • Authors:
  • Adrian Johnstone;Elizabeth Scott;Giorgios Economopoulos

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, United Kingdom;Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, United Kingdom;Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Science of Computer Programming - The fourth workshop on language descriptions, tools, and applications (LDTA'04)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We describe the behaviour of three variants of GLR parsing: (i) Farshi's original Correction to Tomita's non-general algorithm; (ii) the Right Nulled GLR algorithm which provides a more efficient generalisation of Tomita and (iii) the Binary Right Nulled GLR algorithm, on three types of LR table. We present a guide to the parse-time behaviour of these algorithms which illustrates the inefficiencies in conventional Farshi-style GLR parsing. We also describe the tool GTB (Grammar Tool Box) which provides a platform for comparative studies of parsing algorithms; and use GTB to exercise the three GLR algorithms running with LR(0), SLR(1) and LR(1) tables for ANSI-C, ISO-Pascal and IBM VS-COBOL. We give results showing the size of the structures constructed by these parsers and the amount of searching reguired during the parse, which abstracts their runtime.