Schröder, M., & Cito, J. (2022). Grammars for Free: Toward Grammar Inference for Ad Hoc Parsers. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (pp. 41–45). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510455.3512787
E194-03 - Forschungsbereich Business Informatics E194-01 - Forschungsbereich Software Engineering
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Published in:
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results
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ISBN:
9781450392242
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Date (published):
17-Oct-2022
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Event name:
ICSE '22: 44th International Conference on Software Engineering
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Event date:
22-May-2022 - 27-May-2022
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Event place:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America (the)
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Number of Pages:
5
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Publisher:
Association for Computing Machinery
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Peer reviewed:
Yes
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Keywords:
Grammars; Programming Languages; Program Analysis
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Abstract:
Ad hoc parsers are everywhere: they appear any time a string is split, looped over, interpreted, transformed, or otherwise processed. Every ad hoc parser gives rise to a language: the possibly infinite set of input strings that the program accepts without going wrong. Any language can be described by a formal grammar: a finite set of rules that can generate all strings of that language. But programmers do not write grammars for ad hoc parsers---even though they would be eminently useful. Grammars can serve as documentation, aid program comprehension, generate test inputs, and allow reasoning about language-theoretic security. We propose an automatic grammar inference system for ad hoc parsers that would enable all of these use cases, in addition to opening up new possibilities in mining software repositories and bi-directional parser synthesis.
