Assignment 1: Lexer

Assignment 1 is to build a lexer for Appel's Tiger language using ML-Lex. The Tiger language is defined in Appendix A of the course textbook. Documentation on ML-Lex is available on the class web page, and also (in less detail) in chapter two of the textbook.

Skeleton files to get you started are available in the $TIGER/chap2/ directory, which you can find at Appel's textbook homepage. A copy will also be made available on the CoC machines.

You should submit:

• A tiger.lex file, with the source for your lexer.
• Any other source files you wrote to support your lexer.
• A text file describing
  • the members of your team
  • How you handled comments
  • How you handled errors
  • How you handled end-of-file
  • Anything else you think is of interest about your lexer

You're expected to write clean code; just getting it to work is not enough.

Your lexer should use the error-reporting machinery in Appel's ErrorMsg module (see file $TIGER/chap2/errormsg.sml), or something equivalent that you write yourself. In particular, error messages should be reported using line-number/column offsets, not by simply specifying the character offset from the beginning of the file.

Words to the wise: Relative to, say, a parser, it's not hard to build a lexer, but:

• Tiger's lexical grammar has some complexities that may take you more work to handle than you might initially suspect:
  • Comments nest in Tiger.
  • The string-literal syntax is especially complex, involving a lot of subcases, some of which are fairly complex in their own right.
  • Having all of the above machinery interact with your line-number tracking machinery has its own complications.
• If this is your first experience ever programming in SML, you'll need to allocate time generously to deal with coming up to speed on the language.
• Does your lexer do the right thing if eof occurs inside a comment or string-literal?

See the course text for more information, in particular chapter two and appendix A.