In this thesis we develop tools for effective and flexible pattern matching.
We introduce a new pattern matching system called amethyst. Amethyst is not
only a generator of parsers of programming languages, but can also serve as an
alternative to tools for matching regular expressions.
Our framework also produces dynamic parsers. Its intended use is in the
context of IDE (accurate syntax highlighting and error detection on the fly).
Amethyst offers pattern matching of general data structures. This makes it a
useful tool for implementing compiler optimizations such as constant folding,
instruction scheduling, and dataflow analysis in general.
The parsers produced are essentially top-down parsers. Linear time complexity
is obtained by introducing the novel notion of structured grammars and
regularized regular expressions. Amethyst uses techniques known from compiler
optimizations to produce effective parsers.Comment: master thesi
