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From: carlton@aldebaran.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Carlton)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: YACC, going the other way
Keywords: yacc, testing, prolog
Message-ID: <9104240338.AA01486@aldebaran.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 24 Apr 91 03:38:41 GMT
References: <1991Apr23.140427.5416@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
Sender: compilers-sender@iecc.cambridge.ma.us
Reply-To: carlton@aldebaran.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Carlton)
Organization: Compilers Central
Lines: 28
Approved: compilers@iecc.cambridge.ma.us
In-Reply-To: <1991Apr23.163353.28709@cs.odu.edu>

In article <1991Apr23.140427.5416@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> elk@cblpn.att.com (Edwin Lewis King +1 614 860 3394) writes:
>I'm interesting in generating strings that are described by a BNF (OK,
>YACC) grammar.

How proficient are you in Prolog?  Prolog is a very nice environment to
do this sort of thing.

I recently took a bnf specification (written in prolog) of an intermediate 
language an modified it to be a generator for the same language.  The 
specification was an executable program which succeeded iff the input was 
in the language given by the bnf.  It was a simple matter to replace a few
low level test rules such as 
	register(r(I)) :- integer(I). 
with generators such as 
	register(r(0)).
	register(r(1)).

With a suitable set of generators, I was able to generate all interesting
intermediate language statements and then run the output through the backend
for testing.

cheers,
--mike
-- 
Mike Carlton	carlton@cs.berkeley.edu
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