milestone: Try out each toolset on a Tiny example

The purpose of this milestone is to make sure that your group functions well together, to get each toolset installed and working on a small example, and to help you compare between toolsets and languages. You must make these changes for each of flex/bison/C, SableCC 3/Java, and if you do not wish to use either of those, additionally whatever third toolset you are thinking of using for your WIG project (e.g. XText, PLY, flex/bison/C++, etc.). In other words, every group must do the exercises for flex+bison and SableCC 3, and some groups will elect to do them for a third toolset/language combination as well.

You must do the following for each evaluator:

  1. Extend the Tiny expressions with a modulo operator % and an abs(<exp>) function.
  2. Extend the Tiny expressions with an exponentiation operator **. Note that this operator is right-associative, i.e. 2**3**4 is to be parsed as 2**(3**4). Also note that this operator has higher precedence than all other numeric operators.
  3. Fix the pretty printer to output the minimal number of parentheses required to preserve the semantics of the expression: not too few and not too many. You should include support for the additional operators from the previous steps.
  4. Introduce a unary minus operator -<exp> as syntactic sugar for the expression 0-<exp>. This means that unary minus should be defined in the grammar, but not in the abstract syntax trees, meaning there should be no changes to the pretty printer or evaluator. This question is somewhat tricky in SableCC; there is no way in an AST transformation to create a '0' node. You can either a) create a null node and then use a later pass that replaces it with zero, or b) perform a post pass that fixes up any unary minus nodes directly.
  5. The evaluator currently tries to determine the value of the input expression. Fix it to:

    1. Handle division by constant zero properly. This means that an error message should be printed for evaluating <l_exp> / <r_exp> where <r_exp> evaluates to zero.
    2. Handle partial evaluation of expressions involving identifiers. For instance, a + 3 * 4 should evaluate to a + 12 and no error message should be printed.
    3. Perform basic algebra on identifiers. For instance, 0 * a should evaluate to 0.
Include extra tests in the testcases file that demonstrate your ability to handle good and bad input appropriately. Running make check will create a file called result that will contain the output. We will combine the testcases from all groups and use them to test your improved Tiny expression evaluators.

Finally, based on your experiences, answer the following questions for your milestone report:

  1. Which toolset you will use for the WIG project?
  2. What was frustrating about this milestone? Difficult? Time consuming? Boring? Easy? Interesting? Fun? You can include discussion of things such as using version control, group coordination, and environment setup.
  3. What devious extension to the Tiny expressions should we ask students for next year?
The original Tiny source code is here: tiny. Use svn cp to create a branch group-X/tiny/, check that in, and then start your modifications:
  $ cd $HOME/cs520
  $ svn cp public_html/tiny group-x/tiny
  $ svn ci -m'initial checkin of tiny code'
Note that only one person in the group needs to do this; the rest can run svn up in their working copy of the group directory. The milestone report should be checked in as group-X/reports/tiny.txt, ASCII-only, 80 characters wide.

This milestone is due by midnight on Friday of Week 4. It will count for 5% of your grade and take into account the work for this week, the work for last week, and the initial preparatory work of sending in your ssh keys and answering the interview questions. Marks will be generously deducted for late submissions.

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