Hello! Oak is a parser generator based on Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG). This project has been started to explore the idea of typing the AST generated by parsing expressions. It is written as a syntax extension and can be embedded in your Rust code without complicating the build system.

Independently of your programming experience with parser generators, a first step is to read the Getting Started chapter. If you are new to parser generator or PEG, the chapter Learn Oak is a smooth tutorial to Oak for incrementally building a small language named Calc with arithmetic expressions and variable bindings. You can directly dive into the full grammar of Calc in the chapter Full Calc Grammar. If you want to learn about the Oak specificities, please go to the chapter Typing Expression. Finally, in the chapter Related Work, we compare Oak to existing parser generators and give some references and credits to papers or implementations that inspired the design of Oak.

The code is available on github.

• Oak manual – current page.
• Oak runtime documentation

e is a sub expression and T is the type of e. The types are only informative, it does not show unit propagation, more in Typing Expression. Greedy operators do not generate "backtracking points" and consume as many characters as possible.

My goal is to propose a complete library to ease the development of Embedded Domain Specific Language (EDSL) in Rust with procedural macros. For the moment my priority is to stabilize and test Oak. Next I want to add more static analysis to prevent grammar design error such as in "=" / "==" (can you find what is wrong?) Here some other wanted features:

• DONE! Automatic wrapping of values into Spanned<T> structure to get location information (#13).
• Closest relation between host language types and grammar expression types, for example e1 > A / e2 > B with A and B being variants (#41, #53, #54).
• Extend the choice operator to handle erroneous cases (#30).
• Bootstrap the grammar (#42).
• Parametrize rules with other rules and arguments (#10, #12, #28).
• ...

A shortcoming to cleanly achieve these objectives with the Rust compiler is that we can only access item definitions declared inside the procedural macro. It probably means that, for the moment, compositionality would come at the cost of some run-time verifications (or no inter-grammar analysis at all).

Before starting playing with Oak, let's install the nightly compiler and create a skeleton project. We are using the compiler plugins extension which is only available in nightly build of Rust. We advise to use the tool rustup for installing, updating and switching between stable, beta and nightly channels of Rust. The Rust packages manager Cargo will also be installed with the compiler.

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
# Switch to nightly build of Rust.
$ rustup default nightly
# Update Rust compiler and Cargo.
$ rustup update
# Switch to stable.
$ rustup default stable

For avoiding all compatibility troubles between Oak and the Rust compiler, you should use the version of the Rust compiler matching the one used for compiling Oak. This is done by using rustup override add <nightly version> command available in the README.

Once both are installed, we can set up a project using Oak. Run the command cargo new oak_skeleton to create a new project. Modify the Cargo.toml file to add Oak dependencies:

[package]
name = "oak_skeleton"
version = "0.0.1"
authors = ["Pierre Talbot <ptalbot@hyc.io>"]

[dependencies]
oak = "*"
oak_runtime = "*"

The [package] section describe the usual information about your project, here named oak_skeleton and the [dependencies] section lists the libraries available on crates.io that you depend on. You can also directly depend on the git repository:

[dependencies.oak]
git = "https://github.com/ptal/oak.git"

[dependencies.oak_runtime]
git = "https://github.com/ptal/oak.git"
path = "runtime"

Oak is now usable from your src/main.rs:

#![feature(plugin)]
#![plugin(oak)]

extern crate oak_runtime;
use oak_runtime::*;

grammar! sum{
  #![show_api]

  sum = number ("+" number)* > add
  number = ["0-9"]+ > to_number

  use std::str::FromStr;

  fn add(x: u32, rest: Vec<u32>) -> u32 {
    rest.iter().fold(x, |x,y| x+y)
  }

  fn to_number(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> u32 {
    let text: String = raw_text.into_iter().collect();
    u32::from_str(&*text).unwrap()
  }
}

fn main() {
  let state = sum::parse_sum("7+2+1".into_state());
  assert_eq!(state.unwrap_data(), 10);
}

We organized the library into two packages: oak and oak_runtime. The oak dependency is the syntax extension compiling your grammar description into Rust code, the attribute #![plugin(oak)] exposes the macro grammar! which is the only thing you will use from oak. The generated code depends on the library oak_runtime, it also contains structures that you will have to use such as ParseState. The attribute #![feature(plugin)] tells the Rust compiler that we are using unstable features, and that's why we need to use the nightly channel. Keep reading to learn more about the language used in the macro grammar!.

This section is devoted to introduce smoothly the different PEG combinators through a tutorial presenting Calc: a small language with arithmetic expressions and variable bindings. If you want to test the code while reading this tutorial, a skeleton project is available in the chapter Getting Started. This tutorial is split into several sections:

• What is parsing?
• Syntactic atoms of Calc
• Generated code and runtime
• Semantic action
• Choice combinator
• Sequence combinator
• Operator precedence
• Syntactic predicates
• Spacing
• Identifier and keyword
• Operator associativity
• Conclusion
• Exercises

Before diving into the details, we present a program written in Calc:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
let a = 10 - 2 in
let b = a / 2 in
b^2 + 2 * (1 - a)
#}

It declares two local variables a and b initialized with arithmetic expressions and usable within the scope of the let-binding, which is everything after the in. Let-bindings can be composed in cascade but must terminate with an arithmetic expression, such as b^2 + 2 * (1 - a) in our example.

A parser is a bridge between meaning-less sequence of characters and structured representation of data. It tries to give meanings to raw characters by constructing an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) that will be processed by subsequent compilation phases. We expect a parser to transform 7 - 1 into a structure such as Subtraction(i32, i32). As a side note, you should avoid to compute the actual result of 7 - 1 in the parsing step, it works for simple language but tends to entangle syntactic and semantic analysis later. Invalid programs such as let a = 8 in a * b should be correctly parsed while the semantic analysis will be responsible for detecting that b is undeclared.

This tutorial will not cover the semantic analysis part and we will only describe the grammar used for parsing Calc. Our parser will thus produce an AST but without evaluating the expression.

When it comes to elaborate a grammar, we usually start by identifying atoms of the language, e.g. syntactic constructions that can not be divided into smaller ones. These atoms are called tokens and are often processed during a lexical analysis happening before the parsing. Oak is based on Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) and works directly on a stream of characters instead of a stream of tokens. An advantage is to have a unique and coherent grammar syntax which is helpful for composing grammars that do not necessarily expect the same set of tokens. Before continuing reading, try to find out what are the atoms of Calc.

The keywords let and in, the binding operator =, parenthesis () and arithmetic operators +, -, *, /, ^ form the unvalued atoms of the language. Calc has two valued atoms which are identifiers and numbers. Unvalued atoms give a shape to the AST but they do not carry any specific data retrieved from the stream of characters. The following grammar parses the atoms of Calc:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  #![show_api]

  let_kw = "let"
  in_kw = "in"
  bind_op = "="
  add_op = "+"
  sub_op = "-"
  mul_op = "*"
  div_op = "/"
  exp_op = "^"
  lparen = "("
  rparen = ")"

  identifier = ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+
  number = ["0-9"]+
}
#}

A grammar is introduced with the macro grammar! <name> where <name> is the name of the grammar but also the name of the module in which generated functions will lie. A grammar is a set of rules of the form <name> = <expr> where <name> is the rule name and <expr> a parsing expression.

The rules describing keywords and operators use string literals expressions of the form "<literal>", it expects the input to match exactly the sequence of characters given.

Identifiers and numbers are recognized with character classes where a class is a single character or a character range. A range r has the form <char>-<char> inside a set ["r1r2..rN"]. Since - is used to denote a range, it must be placed before or after all the ranges such as in ["-a-z"] to be recognized as an accepted character. Character classes will succeed and "eat" one character if it is present in the set, so b, 8, _ are all accepted by ["a-zA-Z0-9_"] but é, - or ] are not.

For both string literals and character classes, any Unicode characters are interpreted following the same requirements as string literals in the Rust specification. The only other parsing expression consuming a character is the expression . (a simple dot), it consumes any character and can only fail if we reached the end of input.

The remaining parsing expressions are combinators, they must be composed with sub-expressions. Identifiers and numbers are sequences of one or more characters and we use the combinator e+ to repeat e while it succeeds. For example identifier matches "x_1" from the input "x_1 x_2" by successively applying ["a-zA-Z0-9_"] to the input; it parses x, _ and 1 and then fails on the space character. It however succeeds, even if the match is partial, and identifier returns the remaining input " x_2" and the data read. A requirement of e+ is that e must be repeated at least once. The e* expression does not impose this constraint and allows e to be repeated zero or more times. The last combinator in this category is e?, it consumes e zero or one time. The combinators e*, e+ and e? will consume as much input as they can and are said to be greedy operators.

Before explaining the others combinators, we get a glimpse at the generated code and how to use it. Oak will generate two functions per rule, a recognizer and a parser. A recognizer only matches the input against a specific rule and does not build any value from it. A parser matches and builds the corresponding AST (possibly with the help of user-specific functions called semantic actions). For example, the functions parse_identifier and recognize_identifier will be generated for rule identifier. The #![show_api] attribute tells Oak to output, as a compilation note, the signatures of all the generated functions. We obtain the following from the Calc grammar:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
// `ParseState` and `CharStream` should be prefixed by `oak_runtime::`.
// It is removed from this snippet for clarity.
note: pub mod calc {
  pub fn recognize_let_kw<S>(state: ParseState<S, ()>) -> ParseState<S, ()>
    where S: CharStream;
  pub fn parse_let_kw<S>(state: ParseState<S, ()>) -> ParseState<S, ()>
    where S: CharStream;

  pub fn recognize_identifier<S>(state: ParseState<S, ()>) -> ParseState<S, ()>
    where S: CharStream;
  pub fn parse_identifier<S>(state: ParseState<S, ()>)
    -> ParseState<S, Vec<char>> where
    S: CharStream;

  pub fn parse_number<S>(mut state: ParseState<S, ()>)
    -> ParseState<S, Vec<char>> where
    S: CharStream;

  // ...
  // Rest of the output truncated for the tutorial.
}
#}

We can already use these functions in our main:

fn main() {
  let let_kw = "let";
  let state = calc::recognize_let_kw(let_kw.into_state());
  assert!(state.is_successful());

  let ten = "10";
  let state = calc::parse_number(ten.into_state());
  assert_eq!(state.unwrap_data(), vec!['1', '0']);
}

Before continuing, you should know that a documentation of the runtime is available, however be aware that it also contains functions and structures used by the generated code that you will probably not need.

Parsing functions transforms a parsing state into a new one according to the parsing specification. A state can be retrieved from type implementing IntoState with the method into_state(); it is provided for all types implementing the trait Stream used to retrieve a stream: a kind of iterator with special parsing capabilities. For example, IntoState is implemented for the type &'a str and we can directly pass the result of into_state() to the parsing function, as in:

calc::recognize_let_kw(let_kw.into_state())

Basically, a stream must implement several operations described by the CharStream trait, it is generally implemented as an iterator that keeps a reference to the underlying data traversed. You can find a list of all types implementing Stream in the implementors list of Stream, it is also possible to implement Stream for your own type.

By looking at the signatures of parse_identifier and recognize_identifier we see that a value of type ParseState<S, T> is returned. T is the type of the data extracted during parsing. It is always equal to () in case of a recognizer since it does not produce data, and hence a recognizer is a particular case of parser where the AST has type (). In the rest of this tutorial and when not specified, we consider the term parser to also include recognizer.

A state indicates if the parsing was successful, partial or erroneous. It carries information about which item was expected next and the AST built from the data read. Convenient functions such as unwrap_data() or is_successful() are available directly from ParseState. A more complete function is into_result() which transforms the state into a type ParseResult that can be pattern matched. Here a full example:

fn analyse_state(state: ParseState<StrStream, Vec<char>>) {
  use oak_runtime::parse_state::ParseResult::*;
  match state.into_result() {
    Success(data) => println!("Full match: {:?}", data),
    Partial(data, expectation) => {
      println!("Partial match: {:?} because: {:?}", data, expectation);
    }
    Failure(expectation) => {
      println!("Failure: {:?}", expectation);
    }
  }
}

fn main() {
  analyse_state(calc::parse_number("10".into_state())); // complete
  analyse_state(calc::parse_number("10a".into_state())); // partial
  analyse_state(calc::parse_number("a".into_state())); // erroneous
}

// Result:

// Full match: ['1', '0']
// Partial match: ['1', '0'] because: 1:3: unexpected `a`, expecting `["0-9"]`.
// Failure: 1:1: unexpected `a`, expecting `["0-9"]`.

analyse_state shows how to examine the result of a state, however if you just need to debug the result, ParseResult implements Debug so you can use the more generic println("{:?}", state.into_result()) statement to obtain a similar result. You are now able to efficiently use the code generated by Oak.

As you probably noticed, the rule number produces a value of type Vec<char> which is not a usable representation of a number. We must transform this value into a better type such as u32. To achieve this goal, we use a semantic action which gives meaning to the characters read. A semantic action is a Rust function taking the value produced by an expression and returning another one more suited for further processing. The grammar becomes:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules truncated.

  identifier = ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ > to_string
  number = ["0-9"]+ > to_number

  use std::str::FromStr;

  fn to_string(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> String {
    raw_text.into_iter().collect()
  }

  fn to_number(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> u32 {
    u32::from_str(&*to_string(raw_text)).unwrap()
  }
}
#}

The combinator e > f expects a parsing expression on the left and a function name on the right, it works like a "reverse function call operator" in the sense that f is called with the result value of e. Semantic actions must be Rust functions declared inside the grammar! so Oak can examine its return type. You can call function from other modules or crates by wrapping it up inside a function local to the grammar. Any Rust code is accepted, here we added a use statement for importing the from_str function.

Oak gives a type to any parsing expression to help you constructing your AST more easily. Next chapters explain how Oak gives a type to expressions and how you can help Oak to infer better types. For the moment, when you want to know the type of an expression, just creates a rule r = e, activates the attribute #[show_api] and consults the return type of the generated function from the compiler output. Note that a tuple type such as (T, U) is automatically unpacked into two function arguments, so we expect the function to be of type f(T, U) and not f((T, U)).

Note that semantic actions have the property of not being called inside recognizers since they do not build an AST.

We can now build another part of our language: a simple arithmetic calculator where operands can be numbers, variables or a parenthesized expression. We extend the grammar with a factor rule:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  factor
    = number > number_expr
    / identifier > variable_expr

  use self::Expression::*;

  pub type PExpr = Box<Expression>;

  pub enum Expression {
    Variable(String),
    Number(u32)
  }

  fn number_expr(value: u32) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(Number(value))
  }

  fn variable_expr(ident: String) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(Variable(ident))
  }
}
#}

A new combinator appeared! Indeed, an operand can be a number or an identifier (for variables) and these alternatives are expressed with the choice combinator of the form e1 / e2 / ... / eN. It tries the expression e1 and if it fails, it restarts with e2, etc. It fails if the last expression eN fails. An important point is that order matters, hence the grammar is unambiguous, for each input, only one parse tree is possible. It's worth mentioning that this prioritized choice can leads to unexpected, but however easy to detect, wrong behaviour. For example, if you consider identifier / number which reverses the order of the factors, number will never be reached because identifier accepts a super-set of the language recognized by number. Choice combinators naturally map to an enumeration type in Rust, in our example we declared Expression within the macro and is accessible from outside with calc::Expression. We build the variants of the enumeration with our own functions. Note that types can be declared outside the macro, you just need to add the corresponding use statements.

We have all the pieces to parse our first arithmetic expression. We start with + and - because they have the same precedence, we will next add * and /. The sequence combinator is required to parse a sequence of two or more PEGs and is denoted as e1 e2 ... eN. If e1 succeeds, then e2 is called and so on until eN succeeds. It fails if any e fails, this is the main difference with the choice combinator which fails only if the last expression fails. Let's give a look to the new grammar:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  expression
    = factor (term_op factor)* > fold_left

  term_op
    = add_op > add_bin_op
    / sub_op > sub_bin_op

  use self::Expression::*;
  use self::BinOp::*;

  pub type PExpr = Box<Expression>;

  pub enum Expression {
    Variable(String),
    Number(u32),
    BinaryExpr(BinOp, PExpr, PExpr)
  }

  pub enum BinOp {
    Add, Sub
  }

  fn fold_left(head: PExpr, rest: Vec<(BinOp, PExpr)>) -> PExpr {
    rest.into_iter().fold(head,
      |accu, (op, expr)| Box::new(BinaryExpr(op, accu, expr)))
  }

  fn add_bin_op() -> BinOp { Add }
  fn sub_bin_op() -> BinOp { Sub }
}
#}

Parsing rules for arithmetic expression are usually written with left recursion which would give us a rule such as:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
expression
  = factor
  / expression term_op factor
#}

PEG descriptions are closer to the generated code than are context-free language specifications, for example the choice combinator is prioritized, which is similar to nested if-then-else statements in hand-written recursive descent parser. This is why left recursion often leads to infinite loops (and eventually to stack overflow) in PEG implementation while it is nicely handled in other parser generator. Oak does not support left recursion yet so the grammar above will generate invalid code. However, we wrote the first expression rule without left recursion which is made possible with the repetition combinator e* expression instead of recursive rules.

Due to the lack of left recursion, the resulting AST is flatten into a type (PExpr, Vec<(BinOp, PExpr)>) which is not convenient to manipulate during subsequent compilation phases. A problem with this representation is that operator associativity is not directly encoded inside the AST and is later given by the semantic analysis, which is error-prone because it must be considered for every analysis traversing the AST. This is why we use the function fold_left to create a binary tree from this list.

Generally, a programming language has multiple operators that do not share the same precedence. It is the case for a simple arithmetic expression where * and / take precedence over + and -. We show the grammar for Calc basic arithmetic expressions and then expose how to write such rules in the general case.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  expression
    = term (term_op term)* > fold_left

  term
    = factor (factor_op factor)* > fold_left

  factor_op
    = mul_op > mul_bin_op
    / div_op > div_bin_op

  use self::Expression::*;
  use self::BinOp::*;

  pub type PExpr = Box<Expression>;

  pub enum Expression {
    Variable(String),
    Number(u32),
    BinaryExpr(BinOp, PExpr, PExpr)
  }

  pub enum BinOp {
    Add, Sub, Mul, Div
  }

  fn mul_bin_op() -> BinOp { Mul }
  fn div_bin_op() -> BinOp { Div }
}
#}

We added support for multiplication and division with the term rule separating factors by * or /. Note that we re-use the same function fold_left for transforming the expression list into a binary tree. We show how precedence is encoded into these rules by computing step by step the parsing of the Calc program 8-2/2.

1. We enter expression and directly call term which in turn call factor.
2. We enter factor and try the rule number which succeeds. factor returns Number(8).
3. We go back in term and try (factor_op factor)* but factor_op does not match - so e* produces an empty Vec and fold_left returns the first and unchanged value Number(8).
4. We go back in expression and try (term_op term)*, term_op matches - and returns Sub.
5. We re-enter term and since the remaining input is 2/2, it exactly matches the expression factor factor_op factor and returns BinaryExpr(Div, Number(2), Number(2)).
6. We go back in expression and build the final expression BinaryExpr(Sub, Number(8), BinaryExpr(Div, Number(2), Number(2))).

This expression well-respect the precedence of arithmetic operators. A general technique to build a PEG supporting any level of precedence is to nest rules in the invert order of precedence. For example in Calc, numbers and variables have the highest precedence; note that this is always the case for atoms. Addition and subtraction have the lowest precedence and it implies that, for e1+e2, both sub-expressions will first be considered to be terms or factors before trying to parse them as expressions. We suggest that you first group operators by precedence levels and than write the expression rules:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
operators_lvl_1 = "+" / "-"
operators_lvl_2 = "*" / "/"
// ...
operators_lvl_n = "-" // unary minus operator

expr_lvl_1 = expr_lvl_2 (operators_lvl_1 expr_lvl_2)*
expr_lvl_2 = expr_lvl_3 (operators_lvl_2 expr_lvl_3)*
// ...
expr_lvl_n = operators_lvl_n atom
#}

You can freely adapt this template for any level of precedence in your grammar and add the corresponding semantic actions.

Our grammar already parse simple arithmetic expression, we now improve the rule for identifiers. For the moment, 98a is a valid identifier because we stated that identifiers are parsed with ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+, as in classic programming language we would like to forbid a digit to start an identifier. We can achieve that with the combinators we already seen:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  identifier = ["a-zA-Z_"] ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]* > to_string_2

  fn to_string_2(head: char, mut raw_text: Vec<char>) -> String {
    raw_text.push(head);
    to_string(raw_text)
  }
}
#}

It works but seems redundant and does not expressed very well the intention of the grammar writer, it is not clear at a first sight that "0-9" is missing in the first character class. Also, the value produced is split into a 2-tuple with the first argument being a char, which is less comfortable to be used in the semantic action. We want to indicate that the input must not start with a digit and it can be written with a syntactic predicate:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  identifier = !digit ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ > to_string
  number = digit+ > to_number
  digit = ["0-9"]

  fn to_string(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> String {
    raw_text.into_iter().collect()
  }
#}

The syntactic predicate !e succeeds if e fails and in any cases it does not consume input. Its dual combinator is &e which succeeds if e succeeds and is a short-cut for !!e. It can be thought as a if statement which executes the next combinator only if the condition !e or e is true. It is very useful to look-ahead in the buffer without consuming it. For example, we can use the expression !. to check that we are at the end of file, remember that . succeeds if it consumes any single character. It is useful to forbid partial matching directly in the grammar specification instead of consulting the result value.

Spacing is traditionally processed by a lexer (executed before the parsing phase) which transform a character stream into a token stream where blank characters are removed. As said before, PEG works directly on the character stream so we must manage spaces ourself. The following grammar is equipped with spacing.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  program = spacing expression

  identifier = !digit ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ spacing > to_string
  number = digit+ spacing > to_number

  spacing = [" \n\r\t"]* -> (^)

  let_kw = "let" spacing
  in_kw = "in" spacing
  bind_op = "=" spacing
  add_op = "+" spacing
  sub_op = "-" spacing
  mul_op = "*" spacing
  div_op = "/" spacing
  exp_op = "^" spacing
  lparen = "(" spacing
  rparen = ")" spacing
}
#}

The idea is to make sure that blank characters are consumed before the parsing of an atom (such as "let" or ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]). Since only atoms can consume the stream, we need to surround them with the spacing rule such as in spacing "let" spacing. However, for two atoms a1 a2, the spacing rule will be called twice between a1 and a2. We can do better with a new rule program that first call spacing and then expression, it guarantees that the very first blank characters will be consumed. It implies that atoms only need to consume trailing blank characters.

In spacing, the expression [" \n\t"]* has type Vec<char>, but we do not really care about this value. This is why Oak proposes a type annotation combinator e -> (^) to indicate that we do not care about the value of an expression and should be "invisible" in the AST. Oak will automatically propagate (^) in calling site, for example, tuple like ((^), char) are automatically reduced to char. There is much more to say about types but since it is not part of PEG itself, we will discuss about it in the typing expression chapter.

Now we have a grammar for arithmetic expressions, we continue by adding the let-in construction for declaring new variables. It has the form let <ident> = <expression> in <expression> and is parsed by the following grammar.

grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  factor
    = number > number_expr
    / identifier > variable_expr
    / let_expr > let_in_expr
    / lparen expression rparen

  let_expr = let_kw let_binding in_kw expression
  let_binding = identifier bind_op expression

  fn let_in_expr(var: String, value: PExpr, expr: PExpr) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(LetIn(var, value, expr))
  }
}

There is no new concept in this grammar, we have already seen all the combinators used. However it does not work as expected for programs containing let-in expressions. For example, it partially matches let x = 1 in x and the data returned is Variable("let"). It does not work because identifier is parsed before let_expr in factor, so "let" is recognized as a valid identifier. There is clearly some overlapping between the language accepted by identifiers and keywords. It does not help to inverse the order of both rules because variables starting with "let" will be partially matched as the let keyword such as in "leti + 8".

This is a problem specific to PEG due to its combined lexical and parsing analysis. Disambiguation is usually done by the lexer with an ad-hoc keyword table; if an identifier is present in the table, the corresponding token is returned, otherwise it is considered as an identifier. In PEG, we encode this difference directly in the rules with syntactic predicates as follows:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  identifier = !digit !keyword ident_char+ spacing > to_string
  ident_char = ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]

  kw_tail = !ident_char spacing

  keyword = let_kw / in_kw
  let_kw = "let" kw_tail
  in_kw = "in" kw_tail
}
#}

We ensure that a keyword rule never accept the beginning of a valid identifier and conversely, we forbid an identifier to be a valid keyword. The first is done with kw_tail which prevents a valid identifier character (ident_char) to follow a keyword. It must be appended to every keyword or, more generally, to atom using a subset of characters used by identifiers. Instead of the keyword table used in a lexer, we use the rule keyword accepting every keyword of the language and we explicitly prevent an identifier to start with a keyword (see !keyword).

For now, Calc only contains left-associative operators and the corresponding AST is built with the fold_left function. It is pretty simple to transform an operator separated-list of expression to its right-associative version if we use a fold_right function. We extend the Calc grammar with the exponent operator e1 ^ e2 which is right-associative and takes precedence over term expressions.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
grammar! calc {
  // ... previous rules and code truncated.

  term
    = exponent (factor_op exponent)* > fold_left

  exponent
    = (factor exponent_op)* factor > fold_right

  exponent_op = exp_op > exp_bin_op

  pub enum BinOp {
    Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Exp
  }

  fn fold_right(front: Vec<(PExpr, BinOp)>, last: PExpr) -> PExpr {
    front.into_iter().rev().fold(last,
      |accu, (expr, op)| Box::new(BinaryExpr(op, expr, accu)))
  }
#}

A simple trick for right-folding is to reverse the list and to left fold with the accumulator being the last element. It would be correct to write the rule exponent as factor (exponent_op factor)* but since we need the last element for right-folding, we would do unnecessary work in the semantic action. Therefore, it is better to directly write the rule in an adapted way for right-folding.

To summarize, operator associativity is managed by the semantic actions and not directly in the parsing expressions. Generic left and right folding functions can be used to create a binary tree for expressions with left or right associative operators.

That's it! We built a complete grammar for a small language encompassing arithmetic expressions and variable bindings. This tutorial should have covered most of the useful techniques to write your own grammar. The full grammar and usage examples of the Calc language are available in the next chapter. If you want to use the most of Oak capabilities, please read-on and learn how Oak gives types to parsing expressions!

• Extend the grammar to support negative numbers.
• Extend the grammar to support declaration and function call.

The following code is the grammar of the Calc language which is incrementally built and explained in the previous chapter.

#![feature(plugin)]
#![plugin(oak)]

extern crate oak_runtime;
use oak_runtime::*;

grammar! calc {
  #![show_api]

  program = spacing expression

  expression
    = term (term_op term)* > fold_left

  term
    = exponent (factor_op exponent)* > fold_left

  exponent
    = (factor exponent_op)* factor > fold_right

  factor
    = number > number_expr
    / identifier > variable_expr
    / let_expr > let_in_expr
    / lparen expression rparen

  let_expr = let_kw let_binding in_kw expression
  let_binding = identifier bind_op expression

  term_op
    = add_op > add_bin_op
    / sub_op > sub_bin_op

  factor_op
    = mul_op > mul_bin_op
    / div_op > div_bin_op

  exponent_op = exp_op > exp_bin_op

  identifier = !digit !keyword ident_char+ spacing > to_string
  ident_char = ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]

  digit = ["0-9"]
  number = digit+ spacing > to_number
  spacing = [" \n\r\t"]* -> (^)

  kw_tail = !ident_char spacing

  keyword = let_kw / in_kw
  let_kw = "let" kw_tail
  in_kw = "in" kw_tail

  bind_op = "=" spacing
  add_op = "+" spacing
  sub_op = "-" spacing
  mul_op = "*" spacing
  div_op = "/" spacing
  exp_op = "^" spacing
  lparen = "(" spacing
  rparen = ")" spacing

  use std::str::FromStr;
  use self::Expression::*;
  use self::BinOp::*;

  pub type PExpr = Box<Expression>;

  #[derive(Debug)]
  pub enum Expression {
    Variable(String),
    Number(u32),
    BinaryExpr(BinOp, PExpr, PExpr),
    LetIn(String, PExpr, PExpr)
  }

  #[derive(Debug)]
  pub enum BinOp {
    Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Exp
  }

  fn to_number(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> u32 {
    u32::from_str(&*to_string(raw_text)).unwrap()
  }

  fn number_expr(value: u32) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(Number(value))
  }

  fn variable_expr(ident: String) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(Variable(ident))
  }

  fn to_string(raw_text: Vec<char>) -> String {
    raw_text.into_iter().collect()
  }

  fn fold_left(head: PExpr, rest: Vec<(BinOp, PExpr)>) -> PExpr {
    rest.into_iter().fold(head,
      |accu, (op, expr)| Box::new(BinaryExpr(op, accu, expr)))
  }

  fn fold_right(front: Vec<(PExpr, BinOp)>, last: PExpr) -> PExpr {
    front.into_iter().rev().fold(last,
      |accu, (expr, op)| Box::new(BinaryExpr(op, expr, accu)))
  }

  fn let_in_expr(var: String, value: PExpr, expr: PExpr) -> PExpr {
    Box::new(LetIn(var, value, expr))
  }

  fn add_bin_op() -> BinOp { Add }
  fn sub_bin_op() -> BinOp { Sub }
  fn mul_bin_op() -> BinOp { Mul }
  fn div_bin_op() -> BinOp { Div }
  fn exp_bin_op() -> BinOp { Exp }
}

fn analyse_state(state: ParseState<StrStream, calc::PExpr>) {
  use oak_runtime::parse_state::ParseResult::*;
  match state.into_result() {
    Success(data) => println!("Full match: {:?}", data),
    Partial(data, expectation) => {
      println!("Partial match: {:?} because: {:?}", data, expectation);
    }
    Failure(expectation) => {
      println!("Failure: {:?}", expectation);
    }
  }
}

fn main() {
  analyse_state(calc::parse_program("2 * a".into_state())); // Complete
  analyse_state(calc::parse_program("2 *  ".into_state())); // Partial
  analyse_state(calc::parse_program("  * a".into_state())); // Erroneous

  let program1 =
    "let a = 5 in \
     let b = 2 in \
     a^2 + b^2 + (a - b)^2 \
    ";
  analyse_state(calc::parse_program(program1.into_state()));

  let program2 =
    "let a = \
       let b = 7^3 in 2 * b \
     in \
     a^2 - (let x = a in x * 2) \
    ";
  println!("{:?}", calc::parse_program(program2.into_state()).into_result());
}

A key idea behind Oak is to give a type to parsing expression. For example, we expect e1 e2 to have the type (T1, T2) if e1 has type T1 and e2 has type T2. Indeed, it exists an obvious mapping between PEG combinators and traditional types found in programming language: choice is a sum type, sequence is a tuple, repetition is an array, etc. Oak was born to explore this mapping and to answer a question: Can we automatically generate an AST from a grammar description?

It turned out that generating the AST (data type included) was hard, mostly because we need to name types and that rules does not give enough information by themselves – how to name the variants of the sum type? Of course, we could annotate expressions with names but Oak is designed to describe a grammar in the cleanest way as possible in the first place, so this is the best solution. Also, the user will certainly want to use its own custom types and not arbitrary generated types, so a fully automatic generation is not such a good idea. Therefore, Oak relies on the return types of semantic actions to have a complete type inference scheme. That is, the user implicitly brings additional type information to Oak through semantic actions. This technique has at least two advantages over conventional methods:

• A closer mapping between grammar and user-code. For example number "+" number > add is a valid expression where add is a semantic action called with two arguments of the type of number.
• Types are used to generate more efficient code. Indeed, a value is only built if it is useful somewhere. For example the generated code of !number will only recognize the expression number but semantic actions inside number will not be called.

This chapter explains how Oak gives type to expression and how you can efficiently control and use it.

Despite the apparent simplicity of this idea, a direct mapping between expression and type is not very useful. Consider the following grammar for parsing variable identifier.

var_ident = !["0-9"] ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ spacing
spacing = [" \n\r\t"]*

A straightforward mapping would give to this expression the type (char, Vec<char>, Vec<char>) since the sequence has three sub expressions and thus forms a 3-tuple. Clearly, the only value of interest in var_ident is the one returned by the expression ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ which has type Vec<char> (note that we could use a semantic action to transform this value into a string). It is natural to think that the rule var_ident will be of type Vec<char> too. Oak infers this type if we tell him that we do not care about the value of spaces which is not something that it can guess by itself. We use the combinator e -> (^) to inform to Oak that we do not want the value of e to appear in the AST. There is two possible types: unit type () and invisible type (^), they both give the type unit to expressions but, in addition, (^) propagates in the expression tree.

var_ident = !["0-9"] ["a-zA-Z0-9_"]+ spacing
spacing = [" \n\r\t"]* -> (^)

The new type of var_ident is now (char, Vec<char>, (^)). The inference algorithm automatically reduces this type to Vec<char> thanks to a few simplification rules:

• Everything under a syntactic predicate (!e or ?e) has type (^). The new type is ((^), Vec<char>, (^)).
• Any unit type inside a tuple is removed. We now have (Vec<char>).
• Type inside a 1-tuple is extracted. We finally obtain Vec<char>.

These type rewriting rules are intuitive because they produce the type the user expects! Type annotation is only needed to specify that we are not interested by the value, such as with spaces.

A type containing a unit type is simplified if it does not erase a piece of information. If we consider the following grammar which describe the optional presence of the mut keyword on the left-hand side of a let-expression, the mut_kw? type is not rewritten into ().

let_left = let_kw mut_kw? var_ident
let_kw = "let" spacing
mut_kw = "mut" spacing -> ()

We annotated mut_kw with -> () otherwise the expression would have the invisible type since literal string and, here spacing, have the type (^). Therefore, the type of the expression mut_kw? is Option<()> which is expected since the type Option<()> carries a boolean information. As a rule of thumb, unit inference never erase a potential piece of information. In some cases, expression are only of a pure syntactic interest such as spaces or the first optional | in OCaml pattern-matching. This is why we use the "invisible type" annotation e -> (^) to indicate that the unit type must be propagated up since it does not carry any relevant semantic information.

match_expr = match_kw expr with_kw bar? cases
cases = case (bar case)*
bar = "|" spacing

In match_expr, the expression bar? have by default the type (^). The circumflex symbol in (^) indicates a bottom up propagation of unit in expressions. The propagation is only stopped if it is composed with a value of a relevant type. For example, the expression bar? expr has type Expr because (^) has been propagated across Option<(^)> and then stopped by the tuple ((^), Expr).

We must distinguish recursive rules that are totally valid in Oak and recursive types that can not be automatically inferred. For example, the following grammar accepts strings in which any character at position i is 'a' or 'b' if i is even and is otherwise 'c' or 'd'.

ab = ["ab"] cd?
cd = ["cd"] ab?

This is a totally valid grammar but it can not be typed without recursive types. Let's try anyway. Say that ab has type T and cd has type U. We can infer that T = (char, Option<U>) for rule ab and U = (char, Option<T>) for rule cd. By substitution we get T = (char, Option<(char, Option<T>)) and thus T is defined by itself. It is a recursive type definition. You might think that this type is fine as long as we give an alias to the tuple types:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
type T = (char, Option<U>);
type U = (char, Option<T>);
#}

However, the names T and U are completely arbitrary and the user probably do not want types with random names. We would need name-annotations on expressions which is not our leitmotiv in the first place. It is cleaner and easier to let the user constructs the types by himself with semantic actions.

Nevertheless, we did not want to reject valid grammar because of recursive types. We have chosen to print a warning during compilation informing we reduced the types of rules involved in a type cycle to (^). You can get rid of this warning by explicitly annotating one the rule in the cycle with -> (^).

The grammar Calc lacks of an important feature: location tracking and error reporting. The users of our language are not perfect, and they will make mistakes while writing programs. Classical errors include using a variable that is not declared, declaring a variable twice, and most complex static analysis such as typing. Rust is arguably very popular because it has a very good error reporting system, although the static analysis it performs on a program are very complicated (Yes, I have the borrow checker in mind). A lot of effort has been put into making the errors the most understandable and easy to fix as possible. Good errors reporting is key to leverage your compiler from a prototype to a practical piece of software. You should remember that learning a language (and DSL) is often a more difficult task than learning how to use a library, although the programs produced in your language are clearer. Therefore, we want to keep our users testing and trying our language without losing time understanding nasty compilation errors. Why am I talking about all of it? Because good error reporting is only possible if you can track back a fragment of your AST to its location in the source file. And this is one of the role of the parsing stage too, and we provide full support to location tracking with Oak.

In traditional parser generators, the bridge between purely syntactic analysis and AST construction is done with semantic actions. Interaction between an expression and the user code is usually done with one of these two techniques (digit being a rule parsing an integer):

1. Positional arguments: digit "+" digit { $$ = $1 + $3; } is a technique used in Yacc for example.
2. Expression labelling: digit:x "+" digit:y { x + y } is similar to what is used in Menhir (parser generator written in OCaml).

The first technique is often discouraged because some errors can silently appear if you change the order of expression inside a rule without changing the associated action or if you make a mistake when numbering the arguments. The generated code will fail to compile if the host language is statically typed and if the two expressions have different types, but in the general case this technique is not safe. Expression labelling is better but it has the inconvenient of burdening the grammar syntax. Also note that none of these techniques help the user to build the corresponding AST, their purposes is to offer a simple interface between grammar and host code.

Using the idea of typing grammar, we can give a type to each expression and directly pass the value to the semantic action without any labelling or positional notation. The previous example becomes digit "+" digit > add with > being a "reverse function call operator", the expression digit "+" digit produces a value v of type (i32, i32) and the code generated looks like add(v). It is even smarter and will automatically unpack the tuple into function arguments, so the function add will be called with two arguments of type i32.

I read, get inspired or used some ideas of the following implementations (non-exhaustive list):

• rust-peg
• nom
• combine
• Pegged: Annotations in expressions for dropping, discarding, keeping or fusing AST nodes.
• Rats!
• Mouse
• Boost.Spirit: It takes the approach of inferring a type and try to make it compatible with the type provided by the user.
• pegjs

• The initial article of Brian Ford is at the heart of Oak. Bryan Ford. Parsing expression grammars: a recognition-based syntactic foundation. In ACM SIGPLAN Notices, volume 39, pages 111–122. ACM, 2004.
• The following article helped me for error reporting, however there is still more to get from it. André Murbach Maidl, Sérgio Medeiros, Fabio Mascarenhas, and Roberto Ierusalimschy. Error reporting in parsing expression grammars. arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.6646, 2014.
• Robert Grimm. Better extensibility through modular syntax. In ACM SIGPLAN Notices, volume 41, pages 38–51. ACM, 2006.
• ...

A library writer always has the secret hope that its library will be used by thousands. An even more secret hope is that some users would become contributors!

If you want to contribute, please contact me by email (ptalbot@hyc.io) to discuss about a project suited to your ambitions and needs. I'm willing to mentor you until you feel confident with the code and I'm open to suggestions :-)