OpenToken Project Homepage
Last Update - 9/6/00
OpenToken is a series of Ada packages that allow simple
creation of token analyzers (aka: lexical analyzers) in straight inline
Ada code. No precompilation step is required, and there is no arcane error-prone
regular expression language to learn.
The latest version of the Readme file distributed
with the package is available online.
Downloading
The OpenToken package is available here in the following forms
-
3.0b and 2.0
Tar'ed and gnu-zipped (good for Unix systems)
-
3.0b and 2.0
ZIPed (good for Windows systems)
Jürgen Pfeifer was kind enough
to create RPM's of 2.0 for Linux users. They are available on the GNUAda
website in both glibc-2.1
and glibc-2.0
versions.
Documentation
Available now online are the following:
Support
The OpenToken mailing list
is the best place to go for help, or to discuss something related to OpenToken.
You can subscribe to it by sending a message to OpenToken-list-request@AdaPower.com.
with "subscribe" in the body.
There is also an OpenToken discussion
board on AdaPower. Some knowledgable
users may also hang out on comp.lang.ada.
In a real pinch you can try to contact me,
but my "free time" is limited, so your response time would probably be
better with one of the other methods.
News
8/13/00 - Version 3.0b is now available. This version includes a
recursive descent parsing facility which I hope will be the standard in
future versions. I encourage everyone to try this version out and send
me your comments/tokens.
1/27/00 - Version 2.0 is now available. This version includes
an lalr parsing facility and an html syntax, along with numerous fixes.
As the number implies, this version is *not* backward-compatable with the
old version. But updating your old source to work shouldn't be too tough.
Licensing
The code is fully OpenSource. It
is licensed under the Gnat-Modified GPL (aka: GMG), which is GPL
with the Gnat RTL exceptions.
What this means in plain English is that the sources themselves may not
be distributed with a license other than the one they currently have. But
any executable developed using this package may be distributed with whatever
license you like. This is the same license used for Gnat's library sources.
This should actually allow you the user more freedom with source
built against OpenToken than the GPL or the LGPL would give you.
How you can help
One of the strengths of this package is that it may be extended via the
addition of recognizers for new and different classes of tokens. As recognizers
are required to recognize a token, and only a few have been developed so
far, this is also one of its weaknesses. Thus how useful this package is
to the community will have a lot to do with how many new recognizers are
added to it. If you create a new recognizer that may be of general use,
please consider submitting
it for inclusion in the project.
I'm running this project as part of my Master's thesis. As such, I am
interested in any and all feedback. Comments on the design and utility
of the source code would be particularly helpful.
There's a email list avilable for OpenToken. To subscribe, send a message
to OpenToken-list-request@AdaPower.com
with the word "subscribe" in the body. (To remove yourself from the list,
do the same thing with "unsubscribe" in the body). Suggestions and bug
reports may also be sent to me directly at dennison@telepath.com
Thanks go to AdaPower for their support.
