Minnesota Extensible Language Tools Group
Silver Tutorial
This tutorial provides a brief introduction to Silver, an extensible attribute grammar system, and Copper, a parser and context-aware scanner generator. These tools have been developed by the MELT group at the University of Minnesota for specifying extensible languages and generating compilers and translators from these language specifications.
This tutorial is intended for readers with no experience in building language processors such as compilers, source-to-source translators, or interpreters. It assumes that readers are familiar with basic notions from programming languages such as types, control flow, variable declaration, etc. Readers need have no experience with building language processors or with generating language processors. This includes students using Silver and Copper for the first time.
This tutorial may be too remedial for readers who have experience using grammarware tools. Such tools include parser and scanner generators, such as Yacc/Lex, Bison/Flex, ANTLR, ASF+SDF, SGLR, or Copper, attribute grammar systems, such as The Synthesizer Generator, JastAdd, LRC, or Silver, and term rewriting system, such as ASF+SDF and Stratego.
This tutorial is also not self contained. It has numerous pointers to other sources of information as it makes no sense to duplicate perfectly good descriptions of relevant topics found in other sources.
The primary goal of this document is to help new users begin using Silver and Copper. In Section 2 we describe the components in a traditional compiler pipeline: scanner, parser, semantic analyzer, and code generator. In the following sections we describe how to specify each of these using Silver and Copper.