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+
+
+
+ The History of PCCTS
+
+ The Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set
+
+
+ Terence Parr
+ Parr Research Corporation
+ Minneapolis, Minnesota
+ and
+ University of Minnesota
+ Army High Performance Computing Research Center
+
+ [Updated 8-7-94]
+
+
+ The PCCTS project began as a parser-generator project for a gra-
+duate course at Purdue University in the Fall of 1988 taught by Hank
+Dietz- translator-writing systems. Under the guidance of Professor
+Dietz, the parser generator, ANTLR (originally called YUCC), continued
+after the termination of the course and eventually became the subject
+of Terence Parr's Master's thesis. Originally, lexical analysis was
+performed via ALX which was soon replaced by Will Cohen's DLG in the
+Fall of 1989 (DFA-based lexical-analyzer generator, also an offshoot
+of the graduate translation course).
+
+ The alpha version of ANTLR was totally rewritten resulting in
+1.00B. Version 1.00B was released via an internet newsgroup
+(comp.compilers) posting in February of 1990 and quickly gathered a
+large following. 1.00B generated only LL(1) parsers, but allowed the
+merged description of lexical and syntactic analysis. It had rudimen-
+tary attribute handling similar to that of YACC and did not incor-
+porate rule parameters or return values; downward inheritance was very
+awkward. 1.00B-generated parsers terminated upon the first syntax
+error. Lexical classes (modes) were not allowed and DLG did not have
+an interactive mode.
+
+ Upon starting his Ph.D. at Purdue in the Fall of 1990, Terence
+Parr began the second total rewrite of ANTLR. The method by which
+grammars may be practically analyzed to generate LL(k) lookahead
+information was discovered in August of 1990 just before his return.
+Version 1.00 incorporated this algorithm and included the AST mechan-
+ism, lexical classes, error classes, and automatic error recovery;
+code quality and portability were higher. In February of 1992 1.00
+was released via an article in SIGPLAN Notices. Peter Dahl, Ph.D.
+candidate, and Professor Matt O'Keefe (both at the University of Min-
+nesota) tested this version extensively. Dana Hoggatt (Micro Data
+Base Systems, Inc.) came up with the idea of error grouping (strings
+attached to non-terminals) and tested 1.00 heavily.
+
+ Version 1.06 was released in December 1992 and represented a
+large feature enhancement over 1.00. For example, rudimentary seman-
+tic predicates were introduced, error messages were significantly
+improved for k>1 lookahead and ANTLR parsers could indicate that loo-
+kahead fetches were to occur only when necessary for the parse
+
+
+
+ Page 1
+\f
+ PCCTS
+
+
+(normally, the lookahead "pipe" was constantly full). Russell Quong
+joined the project in the Spring of 1992 to aid in the semantic predi-
+cate design. Beginning and advanced tutorials were created and
+released as well. A makefile generator was included that sets up
+dependencies and such correctly for ANTLR and DLG. Very few 1.00
+incompatibilities were introduced (1.00 was quite different from 1.00B
+in some areas).
+
+ 1.10 was released on August 31, 1993 and incorporated bug fixes,
+a few feature enhancements and a major new capability - an arbitrary
+lookahead operator (syntactic predicate), (alpha)?beta. This feature
+was co-designed with Professor Russell Quong also at Purdue. To sup-
+port infinite lookahead, a preprocessor flag, ZZINF_LOOK, was created
+that forced the ANTLR() macro to tokenize all input prior to parsing.
+Hence, at any moment, an action or predicate can see the entire input
+sentence. The predicate mechanism of 1.06 was extended to allow mul-
+tiple predicates to be hoisted; the syntactic context of a predicate
+was also moved along with the predicate.
+
+ In February of 1994, SORCERER (a simple tree-parser generator)
+was released. This tool allows the user to parse child-sibling trees
+by specifying a grammar rather than building a recursive-descent tree
+walker by hand. Work towards a library of tree transformations is
+underway. Aaron Sawdey at The University of Minnesota became a second
+author of SORCERER after the initial release.
+
+ On April 1, 1994, PCCTS 1.20 was released. This was the first
+version to actively support C++ output. It also included important
+fixes regarding semantic predicates and (..)+ subrules. This version
+also introduced token classes, the "not" operator, and token ranges.
+
+ On June 19, 1994, SORCERER 1.00B9 was released. Gary Funck of
+Intrepid Technology joined the SORCERER team and provided very valu-
+able suggestions regarding the "transform" mode of SORCERER.
+
+ On August 8, 1994, PCCTS 1.21 was released. It mainly cleaned up
+the C++ output and included a number of bug fixes.
+
+ From the 1.21 release forward, the maintenance and support of all
+PCCTS tools will be primarily provided by Parr Research Corporation,
+Minneapolis MN---an organization founded on the principles of excel-
+lence in research and integrity in business; we are devoted to provid-
+ing really cool software tools. Please see file PCCTS.FUTURE for more
+information. All PCCTS tools currently in the public domain will con-
+tinue to be in the public domain.
+
+ Looking towards the future, a graphical user-interface is in the
+design phase. This would allow users to view the syntax diagram
+representation of their grammars and would highlight nondeterministic
+productions. Parsing can be traced graphically as well. This system
+will be built using a multiplatform window library. We also antici-
+pate the introduction of a sophisticated error handling mechanism
+called "parser exception handling" in a near future release.
+
+
+
+
+ Page 2
+\f
+ PCCTS
+
+
+ Currently, PCCTS is used at over 1000 known academic, government,
+and commercial sites in 37 countries. Of course, the true number of
+users is unknown due to the large number of ftp sites.
+ Credits
+
+_____________________________________________________________________________
+_____________________________________________________________________________
+|ANTLR 1.00A Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
+|ALX Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
+|ANTLR 1.00B Terence Parr Hank Dietz, Will Cohen |
+|DLG 1.00B Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
+|NFA Relabelling Will Cohen |
+|LL(k) analysis Terence Parr Hank Dietz |
+|ANTLR 1.00 Terence Parr Hank Dietz, Will Cohen |
+|DLG 1.00 Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
+|ANTLR 1.06 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong, Hank Dietz|
+|DLG 1.06 Will Cohen Terence Parr, Hank Dietz |
+|ANTLR 1.10 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong |
+|ANTLR 1.20 Terence Parr Will Cohen, Russell Quong |
+|ANTLR 1.21 Terence Parr Russell Quong |
+|DLG 1.10 Will Cohen Terence Parr |
+|DLG 1.20 Will Cohen Terence Parr |
+|DLG 1.21 Terence Parr |
+|Semantic predicates Terence Parr Russell Quonq |
+|Syntactic predicates Terence Parr Russell Quonq |
+|SORCERER 1.00A Terence Parr |
+|SORCERER 1.00B Terence Parr Aaron Sawdey |
+|SORCERER 1.00B9 Terence Parr Aaron Sawdey, Gary Funck |
+|___________________________________________________________________________|
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