Product overview

Visual BNF is a parsing tool - BNF parser, which is used to generate an LALR / LR (left to right parsing with rightmost derivated syntax tree) tables and DFA (deterministic finite automata) states. This is common parser generator.

This product offers visual coding of BNF (Backus Naur form) syntax, compilation and generation of output parse table dll (dynamic link library), which then can be integrated with Your application.

Visual BNF offers also testing of the new language specified in a BNF syntax to see how it works.  Syntax tree is also available there as new language is being parsed.

This product was named Visual BNF because most of time you might visual parse code and see dynamic syntax tree of tested grammar.  

Design

Visual BNF uses LR(1) and LALR(1) (switchable manually) algorithm to analyze syntax and deterministic finite automaton to identify different class of tokens. The LALR and DFA tables are easy to implement since they rely on lookup state tables.
Visual BNF does not require you to compile tables to your friendly language i.e C++, C#. These tables are generated into .NET assembly and is very easy to integrate with your application just by referencing assembly.
Since the parse tables are programming language independent, the parser engine can be, easily implemented in different programming languages so Your application can be written in other languages.

Components

Your application is responsible to use two of our assemblies to achieve parsing your languages, scripts or regular expressions:
* VisualBNFEngine.dll class framework to access parsing engine
* Parse tables generated by Visual BNF (ie. ParseTable.dll)

Getting started

Begin the journey of creating your own languages, it is very easy. At start point download examples from Download section on this site and see how easy is to integrate parser with Your application. Next, run Visual BNF and load example bnf grammars to experience some bnf syntaxes, also test the grammar whether it is well described, then build grammar with Visual BNF to deploy assembly (.dll) with parse tables to start integrating with Your application. More information you will learn from our manual, how to write bnf grammar correctly. So you will see big impact in parsers programming by using .NET framework advantages. Visual BNF is the first .NET parser generator available in the world.

We hope you enjoy this product!