The Fika Parser Generator

Parser generators automate conversion of a context-free grammar into an executable parser and therefore increase developers’ productivity. However, as soon as the entire process of parser development is concerned, their overall usefulness slightly diminishes because the development of the grammar itself is not addressed at all: every grammar is implicitly expected to be written from scratch and the only available mechanism of grammar reuse is copy and paste. In this paper, we briefly describe the Fika parser generator, our tool that facilitates grammar reuse by modularizing context-free grammar descriptions and providing an inheritance-like module reuse primitive.