BNF Converter

Language Technology Group
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg

News

2012-05-13: Added info on the source repository for BNFC.
2012-03-12: BNFC has a new home: bnfc.digitalgrammars.com.
2011-12-08: BNFC user and developer group created. Please join, and send your questions and bug reports to this group!
2011-01-04: BNFC is part of the CLT Toolkit.
2010-09-23: The source repository has moved again (details TBA). You can now get BNFC from Hackage.
2008-09-23: Note the new Darcs repository location.
2008-01-18: Release of a Darcs snapshot of BNFC 2.4 (beta). See Download below.
2007-06-05: Release of the Darcs repository (see under Download below). This is currently the main distribution channel of BNFC.
BNF Converter is now part of the stable distribution of Debian. Link

What is the BNF Converter?

The BNF Converter is a compiler construction tool generating a compiler front-end from a Labelled BNF grammar. It is currently able to generate C, C++, C#, F#, Haskell, Java, and OCaml, as well as XML representations.

Given a Labelled BNF grammar the tool produces:

an abstract syntax implementation
a case skeleton for the abstract syntax in the same language
an Alex, JLex, or Flex lexer generator file
a Happy, CUP, or Bison parser generator file
a pretty-printer as a Haskell/Java/C++/C module
a Latex file containing a readable specification of the language

User manuals

Tutorial
Report on the LBNF formalism: LBNF-report.pdf
Technical Report
Haskell Mode
Haskell GLR Mode
Java 1.4 Mode
Java 1.5 Mode
C Mode
C++ Mode
O'Caml Mode (2.3b)
XML Mode

Download

Install BNFC from Hackage:

cabal install bnfc

Darcs snapshot 2008-01-18:

BNFC-2.4b.tgz source package
bnfc-2.4b.exe Windows binary
bnfc-2.4b-linux-i386.gz Linux (i386) binary
bndc-2.4b-macosx-i386.gz Mac OS X (i386) binary

Source repository

svn checkout https://svn.spraakdata.gu.se/clt/bnfc

Large examples

A grammar of C. An example C file parsable in type Program.

A grammar of Alfa (For more details, see the Alfa home page.)

A grammar of LBNF. It is at the same time an example LBNF file, parsable in type Grammar. This grammar is used in the implementation of the BNF Converter.

A grammar of Java 1.1 developed by Mike Rainey

Authors

(c) Bjorn Bringert, Johan Broberg, Paul Callaghan, Markus Forsberg, Ola Frid, Peter Gammie, Patrik Jansson, Kristofer Johannisson, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Ulf Norell, Michael Pellauer and Aarne Ranta 2002 - 2011.

License

Free software under GNU General Public License (GPL).