The pi package supports a simple and robust form of lexing and parsing based on top-down recursive descent, and allows users to create parsers using the GoGi graphical interface system. It is used for syntax highlighting, completion, and more advanced language-structure specific functionality in GoGi and in the Gide IDE / editor (where we need to support multiple different languages, and can’t just rely on the excellent builtin Go parser).

We call it Pi (or GoPi) because Ip is not as easy to pronounce, and also because it makes parsing as easy as pi! You can think of it as a French acronym, which are typically the reverse of English ones – “parseur interactif”. Also, it matches Goki and GoGi.

See the Wiki for more detailed docs, and Google Groups goki-gi emailing list.

The pi repository is also home to various other basic file-level packages including:

• filecat – categorizes file types based on suffix and magic cookies, etc. Uses both gabriel-vasile/mimetype and h2non/filetype packages.

• spell – spell-checking based on sajari/fuzzy.

• complete – basic completion / lookup infrastructure.

• lsp – language server protocol interface (incomplete).

Overview of language support

pi/lang.go defines the Lang interface, which each supported language implements (at least a nil stub) – at a minimum the Parser, ParseFile(which includes just lexing if that is all that is needed), and HiLine methods should be implemented, to drive syntax highlighting / coloring / tagging. Optionally, completion, lookup, etc can be implemented. See langs/golang for a full implementation, and langs/tex for a more minimal lex-only case.

pi/langsup.go has tables of supported languages and their properties, in LangProps.

pi in general has overall management methods for coordinating the lex (lexing) and parse parsing steps.

lex also has a variety of random manual and indent functions that are useful for special-case manual parsing cases.

Parsing Strategy

Pi uses a robust, top-down Recursive Descent (RD) parsing technique (see WikiPedia), which is the approach used by most hand-coded parsers, which are by far the most widely used in practice (e.g., for gcc, clang, and Go) for various reasons – see this stack overflow thread too. As far as we can tell (e.g., from this list on WikiPedia ) there are not many recursive-descent parser generators, and none that use the same robust, simple techniques that we employ in GoPi.

Most parsing algorithms are dominated by a strong sequentiality assumption – that you must parse everything in a strictly sequential, incremental, left-to-right, one-token-at-a-time manner. If you step outside of that box (or break with the herd if you will), by loading the entire source in to RAM and processing the entire thing as a whole structured entity (which is entirely trivial these days – even the biggest source code is typically tiny relative to RAM capacity), then much simpler, more robust solutions are possible. In other words, instead of using a “1D” solution with a tiny pinhole window onto the code, we use a 3D solution to parsing (line, char, and nesting depth). This is not good for huge data files (where an optimized, easily parsed encoding format is appropriate), but it is great for programs, which is what GoPi is for.

Specifically, we carve the whole source in to statement-level chunks and then proceed to break that apart into smaller pieces by looking for distinctive lexical tokens anywhere in the statement to determine what kind of statement it is, and then proceed recursively to carve that up into its respective parts, using the same approach. There is never any backtracking or shift-reduce conflicts or any of those annoying issues that plague other approaches – the grammar you write is very directly the grammar of the language, and doesn’t require a lot of random tweaks and special cases to get it to work.

For example, here are the rules for standard binary expressions (in Go or most other languages):

        SubExpr:         -Expr '-' Expr
        AddExpr:         -Expr '+' Expr
        RemExpr:         -Expr '%' Expr
        DivExpr:         -Expr '/' Expr
        MultExpr:        -Expr '*' Expr

and here are some of the more complicated statements (in Go):

    IfStmt {
        IfStmtExpr:  'key:if' Expr '{' ?BlockList '}' ?Elses 'EOS'
        IfStmtInit:  'key:if' SimpleStmt 'EOS' Expr '{' ?BlockList '}' ?Elses 'EOS'
    }
    ForStmt {
       ForRangeExisting:  'key:for' ExprList '=' 'key:range' Expr '{' ?BlockList -'}' 'EOS'
       ForRangeNewLit:  'key:for' NameList ':=' 'key:range' @CompositeLit '{' ?BlockList -'}' 'EOS' 
       ...
    }

See the complete grammar for Go for everything, including the lexer rules (at the top).

While GoPi is likely to be a lot easier to use than yacc and bison, the latest version 4 of ANTLR with its ALL(*) algorithm sounds like it offers similar abilities to robustly handle intuitive grammars, and is likely more generalizable to a wider range of languages, and is probably faster overall than GoPi. But GoPi is much simpler and more transparent in terms of how it actually works (disclaimer: I have no idea whatsoever how ANTLR V4 actually works! And that’s kind of the point..). Anyone should be able to understand how GoPi works, and tweak it as needed, etc. And it operates directly in AST-order, creating the corresponding AST on the fly as it parses, so you can interactively understand what it is doing as it goes along, making it relatively easy to create your grammar (although this process is, in truth, always a bit complicated and never as easy as one might hope). And GoPi is fast enough for most uses, taking just a few hundred msec for even relatively large and complex source code, and it processes the entire Go standard library in around 40 sec (on a 2016 Macbook laptop).

Three Steps of Processing

GoPi does three distinct passes through the source file, each creating a solid foundation upon which the next step operates.

• Lexer – takes the raw text and turns it into lexical Tokens that categorize a sequence of characters as things like a Name (identifier – a string of letters and numbers without quotes) or a Literal of some type, for example a LitStr string that has some kind of quotes around it, or a LitNum which is a number. There is a nice category (Cat) and subcategory (SubCat) level of organization to these tokens (see token/token.go). Comments are absorbed in this step as well, and stored in a separate lex output so you can always access them (e.g., for docs), without having to deal with them in the parsing process. The key advantage for subsequent steps is that any ambiguity about e.g., syntactic elements showing up in comments or strings is completely eliminated right at the start. Furthermore, the tokenized version of the file is much more compact and contains only the essential information for parsing.

• StepTwo – this is a critical second pass through the lexical tokens, performing two important things:

  • Nesting Depth – all programming languages use some form of parens ( ) brackets [ ] and braces { } to group elements, and parsing must be sensitive to these. Instead of dealing with these issues locally at every step, we do a single pass through the entire tokenized version of the source and compute the depth of every token. Then, the token matching in parsing only needs to compare relative depth values, without having to constantly re-compute that. As an extra bonus, you can use this depth information in syntax highlighting (as we do in Gide).

  • EOS Detection – This step detects end of statement tokens, which provide an essential first-pass rough-cut chunking of the source into statements. In C / C++ / Go and related languages, these are the semicolons ; (in Go, semicolons are mostly automatically computed from tokens that appear at the end of lines – Pi supports this as well). In Python, this is the end of line itself, unless it is not at the same nesting depth as at the start of the line.

• Parsing – finally we parse the tokenized source using rules that match patterns of tokens, using the top-down recursive descent technique as described above, starting with those rough-cut statement chunks produced in StepTwo. At each step, nodes in an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) are created, representing this same top-down broad-to-narrow parsing of the source. Thus, the highest nodes are statement-level nodes, each of which then contain the organized elements of each statement. These nodes are all in the natural functional hierarchical ordering, not in the raw left-to-right order of the source, and directly correspond to the way that the parsing proceeds. Thus, building the AST at the same time as parsing is very natural in the top-down RD framework, unlike traditional bottom-up approaches, and is a major reason that hand-coded parsers use this technique.

Once you have the AST, it contains the full logical structure of the program and it could be further processed in any number of ways. The full availability of the AST-level parse of a Go program is what has enabled so many useful meta-level coding tools to be developed for this language (e.g., gofmt, go doc, go fix, etc), and likewise for all the tools that leverage the clang parser for C-based languages.

In addition, GoPi has Actions that are applied during parsing to create lists of Symbols and Types in the source. These are useful for IDE completion lookup etc, and generally can be at least initially created during the parse step – we currently create most of the symbols during parsing and then fill in the detailed type information in a subsequent language-specific pass through the AST.

RD Parsing Advantages and Issues

The top-down approach is generally much more robust: instead of depending on precise matches at every step along the way, which can easily get derailed by errant code at any point, it starts with the “big picture” and keeps any errors from overflowing those EOS statement boundaries (and within more specific scopes within statements as well). Thus, errors are automatically “sandboxed” in these regions, and do not accumulate. By contrast, in bottom-up parsers, you need to add extensive error-matching rules at every step to achieve this kind of robustness, and that is often a tricky trial-and-error process and is not inherently robust.

Solving the Associativity problem with RD parsing: Put it in Reverse!

One major problem with RD parsing is that it gets the associativity of mathematical operators backwards. To solve this problem, we simply run those rules in reverse: they scan their region from right to left instead of left to right. This is much simpler than other approaches and works perfectly – and is again something that you wouldn’t even consider from the standard sequential mindset. You just have to add a - minus sign at the start of the Rule to set the rule to run in reverse – this must be set for all binary mathematical operators (e.g., BinaryExpr in the standard grammar, as you can see in the examples above).

Also, for RD parsing, to deal properly with the order of operations, you have to order the rules in the reverse order of precedence. Thus, it matches the lowest priority items first, and those become the “outer branch” of the AST, which then proceeds to fill in so that the highest-priority items are in the “leaves” of the tree, which are what gets processed last. Again, using the Pie GUI and watching the AST fill in as things are parsed gives you a better sense of how this works.

Principle of Preemptive Specificity

A common principle across lexing and parsing rules is the principle of preemptive specificity – all of the different rule options are arranged in order, and the first to match preempts consideration of any of the remaining rules. This is how a switch rule works in Go or C. This is a particularly simple way of dealing with many potential rules and conflicts therefrom. The overall strategy as a user is to put the most specific items first so that they will get considered, and then the general “default” cases are down at the bottom. This is hopefully very intuitive and easy to use.

In the Lexer, this is particularly important for the State elements: when you enter a different context that continues across multiple chars or lines, you push that context onto the State Stack, and then it is critical that all the rules matching those different states are at the top of the list, so they preempt any non-state-specific alternatives. State is also avail in the parser but is less widely used.

Generative Expression Subdomains

There are certain subdomains that have very open-ended combinatorial “generative” expressive power. These are particular challenges for any parser, and there are a few critical issues and tips for the Pi parser.

Arithmetic with Binary and Unary Operators

You can create arbitrarily long expressions by stringing together sequences of binary and unary mathematical / logical operators. From the top-down parser’s perspective, here are the key points:

1. Each operator must be uniquely recognizable from the soup of tokens, and this critically includes distinguishing unary from binary: e.g., correctly recognizing the binary and unary - signs here: a - b * -c

2. The operators must be organized in reverse order of priority, so that the lowest priority operations are factored out first, creating the highest-level, broadest splits of the overall expression (in the Ast tree), and then progressively finer, tighter, inner steps are parsed out. Thus, for example in this expression:

if a + b * 2 / 7 - 42 > c * d + e / 72

The broadest, first split is into the two sides of the > operator, and then each of those sides is progressively organized first into an addition operator, then the * and /.

3. The binary operators provide the recursive generativity for the expression. E.g., Addition is specified as:

AddExpr: Expr '+' Expr

so it just finds the + token and then descends recursively to unpack each of those Expr chunks on either side, until there are no more tokens left there.

One particularly vexing situation arises if you have the possibility of mixing multiplication with de-pointering, both of which are indicated by the * symbol. In Go, this is particularly challenging because of the frequent use of type literals, including those with pointer types, in general expressions – at a purely syntactic, local level it is ambiguous:

var MultSlice = p[2]*Rule // this is multiplication
var SliceAry = [2]*Rule{}  // this is an array literal

we resolved this by putting the literal case ahead of the general expression case because it matches the braces {} and resolves the ambiguity, but does cause a few other residual cases of ambiguity that are very low frequency.

Path-wise Operators

Another generative domain are the path-wise operators, principally the “selector” operator . and the slice operator '[' SliceExpr ']', which can be combined with method calls and other kinds of primary expressions in a very open-ended way, e.g.,:

ps.Errs[len(ps.Errs)-1].Error()[0][1].String()

In the top-down parser, it is essential to create this open-ended scenario by including pre-and-post expressions surrounding the Slice and Selector operators, which then act like the Expr groups surrounding the AddExpr operator to support recursive chaining. For Selector, the two Expr’s are required, but for Slice, they are optional - that works fine:

Slice: ?PrimaryExpr '[' SliceExpr ']' ?PrimaryExpr

Without those optional exprs on either side, the top-down parser would just stop after getting either side of that expression.

As with the arithmetic case, order matters and in the same inverse way, where you want to match the broader items first.

Overall, processing these kinds of expressions takes most of the time in the parser, due to the very high branching factor for what kinds of things could be there, and a more optimized and language-specific strategy would undoubtedly work a lot better. We will go back and figure out how the Go parser deals with all this stuff at some point, and see what kinds of tricks we might be able to incorporate in a general way in GoPi.

There remain a few low-frequency expressions that the current Go parsing rules in GoPi don’t handle (e.g., see the make test target in cmd/pi directory for the results of parsing the entire Go std library). One potential approach would be to do a further level of more bottom-up, lexer-level chunking of expressions at the same depth level, e.g., the a.b selector pattern, and the []slice vs. array[ab] and func(params) kinds of patterns, and then the parser can operate on top of those. Thus, the purely top-down approach seems to struggle a bit with some of these kinds of complex path-level expressions. By contrast, it really easily deals with standard arithmetic expressions, which are much more regular and have a clear precedence order.

Please see the Wiki for more detailed docs, discussion, etc.