Description
1. The problem
Use a combination of Flex and Bison code as instructed in class to build and drive a scanner for the Cprogramming language. A grammar for C- is available on the course website. Your scanner will be
named c- (note the lowercase). That is, c- will ultimately be the compiler for the language C-. Your
scanner will read and process a stream of characters representing tokens from a file. The filename may
be given as an argument to the c- command, or the input can come from standard input if the filename
argument is not present. This means that the user can pass the C- code in file filename.c- to c- in
any of the three following ways:
$bash> c- filename.c-
$bash> cat filename.c- | c-
$bash> c- < filename.cTo get this to work will require that you be able to optionally read a file from the command line. You
will need to define arguments to main and use the yacc/bison variable named yyin to read from the file
that the user has specified. You should use fopen to get a FILE* that you then assign to yyin.
For this assignment you are to build a scanner using lex/flex and a driver for the scanner using
yacc/bison. We will be using both lex and yacc for all other assignments as well, so figuring out how
to get them to work together will be worth your effort. The machine cs-445.cs.uidaho.edu is available
for class use using your UI credentials. That is where the grading will occur and your homework
must compile and run on this machine. There are no exceptions to this.
1.1 The flex Part
Build a flex scanner that returns a token class for each token in the C- grammar. For numbers it should
also “return” a numerical value and the string that the user typed. For identifiers (ids) it should also
return a string. It should treat the Booleans “true” and “false” as keywords but internally treat them as
members of the token class BOOLCONST with values 0 and 1 for false and true respectively. The
scanner should ignore comments and whitespace characters.
Your scanner will generate an error if there is an illegal character in the input. This occurs when none
of the token patterns match the the current location in the input stream. See the example output for the
exact wording of the error message to be used in this case. No token will be returned in the case of this
error and scanning will continue.
Your scanner will generate an warning if a character constant is given with more than one character
(i.e. ‘dogs’). If this happens the first character will be used, the remaining ignored, and a warning will
be issued. See the example output for the exact wording of the error message to be used in this case.
Your scanner will generate an error if a character constant is given that contains no characters (i.e. ‘’).
No token will be returned and the token ignored. See the example output for the exact wording of the
error message to be used in this case.
Your scanner will keep track of the line number of each token encountered and return it with the token
and a string and and/or numeric representation of the token, if appropriate, in a struct or class instance.
This can be accomplished by using yylval to contain a pointer to a struct or class instance that you
create and want to return.
You may not use YYSTYPE for this assignment. Points will be deducted if you choose to ignore this
warning. Directly accessing YYSTYPE is considered poor programming practice. The flex and bison
tools provide the %union construct to facilitate defining a symbol type for yylval without stripping
away the insulation provided by YYSTYPE. Please use %union and not YYSTYPE.
1.2 The bison Part
Build a simple bison parser that accepts any stream of legal tokens from the scanner. You will have to
come up with the simple grammar for this. This is a grammar for just a stream of any legal tokens,
it is not the grammar for C-! This will serve as a “driver” to drive your scanner (the flex part). The
bison part prints out the line number, the token type, and any extra information returned by the scanner.
See example output to see what it should look like.
Your homework 1 program will just recognize tokens in C- and will not recognize grammatical
constructs of C-. One of the goals of this assignment is to get the basic build and communication
between flex and bison up and running. A template for constructing your bison file for this assignment
is contained on the course website.
1.3 The Test Data
Sample test inputs and their corresponding outputs are provided for this assignment. These are
available on the course website. You should examine these inputs and their corresponding outputs very
carefully and ensure that your program behaves precisely like these examples.
Character constants in test files may be the NUL character (‘\0’) and will therefore print in a way that
cannot be seen if you use a “%c” format string. This is expected. Be sure to use the “%c” format
string for all characters on this homework. Failure to do so will result in output that does not match the
examples, which will result in points being deducted from your homework.
Note in the provided test data that the class of any single special character token is printed as the
characters itself, and the class of any multi-character token is printed as an uppercase string. Follow
this example in your program to produce results that are the same as the provided examples.
2. Deliverables and Submission
Your homework will be submitted as an uncompressed .tar file that contains no subdirectories. Your .tar
file will contain at least the following items:
1. A file named parser.l that contains your flex code.
2. A file named parser.y that contains your bison code.
3. A file named scanType.h that contains the declaration of either a struct or class that is used to pass
your token information back from the scanner. This file must be #included in the right place in your
flex and bison files. An example of the declaration of a struct that can be used to pass token
information back from the scanner is shown below:
struct TokenData {
int tokenclass; // token class
int linenum; // line where found
char *tokenstr; // what string was actually read
char cvalue; // any character value
int nvalue; // any numeric value or Boolean value
char *svalue; // any string value e.g. an id
};
4. A makefile (note the all lowercase) that will be executed to build your c-. The name of this file must
be in all lowercase letters in order to work correctly on the test machine.
The uncompressed .tar file is submitted to the class submission page. You can submit as many times as
you like. The last file you submit before the deadline will be the only one graded. No late
submissions are accepted for this assignment. For all submissions you will receive email at your
uidaho address showing how your file performed on the pre-grade tests. The grading program will use
more extensive tests, so thoroughly test your program with inputs of your own.
Your code must compile successfully and have no shift/reduce or reduce/reduce conflicts in bison.
Your code must run with no runtime errors such as segmentation violations (SIGSEGVs).