The Project

Chapter 1. Introduction

This document describes how to use the sid parser generator. It was written for sid version 1.9. The main features of each version of sid are listed below:

sid turns specifications of languages into programs that recognise those languages. One of the aims of sid was to separate the specification of the language to be recognised from the language that the recogniser program is written in. For this reason, input to sid is split into two components: output language independent information, and output language dependent information.

At present, sid will only output programs in C (either ISO or pre-ISO), but it is designed so that adding new output languages should be fairly simple. There is one other pseudo-language: the test language. This is used for testing grammars and the transforms, but will not output a parser.