Parsing@SLE is a workshop on parsing programming languages, now in its third edition. The intended participants are the authors of parser generation tools and parsers for programming languages and other software languages. For the purpose of this workshop ``parsing'' is a computation that takes a sequence of characters as input and produces a syntax tree or graph as output. This possibly includes tokenization using regular expressions, deriving trees using context- free grammars, and mapping to abstract syntax trees. The goal is to bring together today’s experts in the field of parsing, in order to explore open questions and possibly forge new collaborations. The topics may include algorithms, implementation and generation techniques, syntax and semantics of meta formalisms (BNF), etc.

Topic

The topics of parsing and parser generation, both in theory and in practice, may be old, yet there are still challenging problems with respect to the construction and maintenance of parsers. Especially in the context of real programming languages there are ample theoretical as well as practical obstacles to be taken. Contemporary parsing challenges are caused by programming language evolution and diversity in the face of new application areas such as IDE construction, reverse engineering, software metrics, domain specific (embedded) languages, etc. What are modular meta-formalisms for parser generation? How to obtain (fast and correct) parsers for both legacy and new languages that require more computational power than context-free grammars and regular expressions can provide? How to use increasing parallelism offered by multi-cores and GPUs in parsers? How to enable the verified construction or prototyping of parsers for languages such as COBOL, C++ and Scala without years of effort? How to parse languages in which white-space is significant (e.g. Python)?

Call for talk proposals

We solicit talk proposals in the form of short abstracts (max. 2 pages). A good talk proposal describes an interesting position, demonstration, or early achievement. The submissions will be reviewed on relevance and clarity, and used to plan the mostly interactive sessions of the workshop day. Parsing@SLE is not a publication venue. Publication of accepted abstracts and slides on the website is voluntary.