Sourceforge application submitted 2001-05-03 05.24
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Project name: Rockit

Project purpose and summary:
The Rockit project aims to develop a modular and fully object-oriented library for compiler construction in Ruby. Right now its focused on parser generation and generate lexers and parser that give you abstract syntax trees from strings. The parsing method used is a very powerful one called "Generalized LR Parsing with Scanner Forking" that allows concise grammars close to how a human would write them (ie. no strange rewrites to make them usable by parser gen). The grammar formalism is extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF). The resulting abstract syntax trees are "Ruby-aware" using arrays to collect sequences of tokens etc.

In the long run Rockit will include support for other aspects of compiler construction such as syntax-directed translation, pretty-printer generation, type checking etc.

Rockit is an acronym for "Ruby Object-oriented Compiler construction toolKIT". It is the compiler construction part of the RubyVM project. Since its useful standalone, outside RubyVM I think its better to have it as a SourceForge project of its own.

We will mainly use the CVS capabilities of SourceForge and add a project home page but may use additional services as we find them and see a need.

Even though Rockit is GPL the generated parsers are LGPL.

License: GPL

Public description: Rockit - the Ruby Object-oriented Compiler construction toolKIT.

Unix name: rockit

