Distinguished Engineer Gilad Bracha, Cadence Design Systems

Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System.

He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Presentation: "Executable Grammars"

Track: Five Things I Wish I Learned In College

Time: Monday 16:00 - 17:00

Location: Conference Hall

Abstract:

Parser combinators are an approach to writing parsers that originates in the functional programming community.

I'll describe a parser combinator library written in Newspeak, a new language descended from Smalltalk.

Parsers written using this library are remarkably similar to BNF; they are almost entirely free of solution-space (i.e., programming language) artifacts.

The system allows the grammar to be specified as a separate class or mixin, independent of tools that rely upon it such as parsers, syntax colorizers etc.

Thus, our grammars serve as a shared executable specification for a variety of language processing tools. This motivates our use of the term "executable grammar". Time permitting, I will also discuss the role of specific language features in enabling these pleasing results.

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