ANN: PLY-2.0 (Python Lex Yacc)

[David Beazley]

September 8, 2006

                   Announcing :  PLY-2.0 (Python Lex-Yacc)

                         http://www.dabeaz.com/ply

I'm pleased to announce a significant new update to PLY---a 100% Python
implementation of the common parsing tools lex and yacc.  PLY-2.0  
features
a completely new implementation of LALR(1) parsing that provides a
significant speedup when generating the underlying parsing tables. This
new implementation also (hopefully) fixes all outstanding bugs in LALR 
(1)
parsing that were reported for previous versions of PLY-1.x.

Here are a few PLY highlights:

   -  PLY is closely modeled after traditional lex/yacc.  If you know  
how
      to use these or similar tools in other languages, you will find
      PLY to be comparable.

   -  PLY provides very extensive error reporting and diagnostic
      information to assist in parser construction.  The original
      implementation was developed for instructional purposes.  As
      a result, the system tries to identify the most common types
      of errors made by novice users.

   -  PLY provides full support for empty productions, error recovery,
      precedence rules, and moderately ambiguous grammars.

   -  Parsing is based on LR-parsing which is fast, memory efficient,
      better suited to large grammars, and which has a number of nice
      properties when dealing with syntax errors and other parsing
      problems. Currently, PLY can build its parsing tables using
      either SLR or LALR(1) algorithms.

   -  PLY can be used to build parsers for large programming languages.
      Although it is not ultra-fast due to its Python implementation,
      PLY can be used to parse grammars consisting of several hundred
      rules (as might be found for a language like C).  The lexer and LR
      parser are also reasonably efficient when parsing normal
      sized programs.

More information about PLY can be obtained on the PLY webpage at:

                    http://www.dabeaz.com/ply

PLY is freely available and is licensed under the terms of the Lesser
GNU Public License (LGPL).

Cheers,

David Beazley (http://www.dabeaz.com)