Writing simple parser in Perl: having lexer output, where to go next? - perl

Question

I'm trying to write a simple data manipulation language in Perl (read-only, it's meant to transform SQL-inspired queries into filters and properties to use with vSphere Perl API: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/topic/com.vmware.perlsdk.pg.doc/viperl_advancedtopics.5.1.html_)
I currently have something similar to lexer output if I understand it properly - a list of tokens like this (Data::Dumper prints array of hashes):
$VAR1 = {
'word' => 'SHOW',
'part' => 'verb',
'position' => 0
};
$VAR2 = {
'part' => 'bareword',
'word' => 'name,',
'position' => 1
};
$VAR3 = {
'word' => 'cpu,',
'part' => 'bareword',
'position' => 2
};
$VAR4 = {
'word' => 'ram',
'part' => 'bareword',
'position' => 3
};
Now what I'd like to do is to build a syntax tree. The documentation I've seen so far is mostly on using modules and generating grammars from BNF, but at the moment I can't wrap my head around it.
I'd like to tinker with relatively simple procedural code, probably recursive, to make some ugly implementation myself.
What I'm currently thinking about is building a string of $token->{'part'}s like this:
my $parts = 'verb bareword bareword ... terminator';
and then running a big and ugly regular expression against it, (ab)using Perl's capability to embed code into regular expressions: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html#A-bit-of-magic:-executing-Perl-code-in-a-regular-expression:
$parts =~ /
^verb(?{ do_something_smart })\s # Statement always starts with a verb
(bareword\s(?{ do_something_smart }))+ # Followed by one or more barewords
| # Or
# Other rules duct taped here
/x;
Whatever I've found so far requires solid knowledge of CS and/or linguistics, and I'm failing to even understand it.
What should I do about lexer output to start understanding and tinker with proper parsing? Something like 'build a set of temporary hashes representing smaller part of statement' or 'remove substrings until the string is empty and then validate what you get'.
I'm aware of the Dragon Book and SICP, but I'd like something lighter at this time.
Thanks!

Answer 1

As mentioned in a couple of comments above, but here again as a real answer:
You might like Parser::MGC. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of Parser::MGC)
Start by taking your existing (regexp?) definitions of various kinds of token, and turn them into "token_..." methods by using the generic_token method.
From here, you can start to build up methods to parse larger and larger structures of your grammar, by using the structure-building methods.
As for actually building an AST - it's possibly simplest to start with to simply emit HASH references with keys containing named parts of your structure. It's hard to tell a grammatical structure from your example given in the question, but you might for instance have a concept of a "command" that is a "verb" followed by some "nouns". You might parse that using:
sub parse_command
{
my $self = shift;
my $verb = $self->token_verb;
my $nouns = $self->sequence_of( sub { $self->token_noun } );
# $nouns here will be an ARRAYref
return { type => "command", verb => $verb, nouns => $nouns };
}
It's usually around this point in writing a parser that I decide I want some actual typed objects instead of mere hash references. One easy way to do this is via another of my modules, Struct::Dumb:
use Struct::Dumb qw( -named_constructors );
struct Command => [qw( verb nouns )];
...
return Command( verb => $verb, nouns => $nouns );