Stacks of Tokens

A study in interfaces

Sydney Go Meetup

15 September 2016

Rob Pike

Google

Background

Spoke at Gophercon this year: go.dev/talks/2016/asm.slide

That talk was about system design and portability.

Today's talk is about its lexer.

Spoke about lexing before: go.dev/talks/2011/lex.slide

That talk showed a way to use concurrency to build a lexer.

Today's talk is about interfaces.

2

Lexer

A lexer, also called a scanner, breaks the input stream into distinct "tokens":

Each token has a type and a value.

3

Example

MOVQ    R0, 4(R1)

The lexer turns this into the stream

Spaces are ignored.

The parser then reads these tokens to parse the input into a parse tree.

4

Go's text/scanner package

There is a nice, efficient lexer package in the Go standard library:

It can do this job just fine.

But.... that is not enough for the assembler because of

5

Backwards compatibility

The new Go assembler had to be totally compatible with the ones it replaces, which used YACC and were written in C. (See https://go.dev/talks/2015/gogo.slide.)

Each assembler (one per architecture) contained these lines at the end of lex.c: 

#include "../cc/lexbody"
#include "../cc/macbody"

This gave the assemblers the same lexer as the C compiler.
The differences between C tokens and Go tokens are minor and can be handled, but....

The C lexer brings in something problematic.

6

The C preprocessor

The old assemblers had a C preprocessor built in!
An old-fashioned one, without #if and token pasting, but still: 

#include "file" 
#define  MAXBUF 512 
#define  MULDIV(a, b, c)  ((a)*(b)/(c)) 
#ifdef   MAXBUF
#endif

The text/scanner package can't handle this.
But we need to do it to be compatible.

This talk is about how to use Go's interfaces to do it.

7

An observation

What is standard input? An input source.

What is an included file? An input source.

What is a macro invocation? An input source.

Sounds a lot like io.Reader.

8

Token reader

We don't want bytes, we want tokens. (Why?)

Instead of 

type Reader interface {
    Read(p []byte) (n int, err error)
}

we want something like 

type TokenReader interface {
    ReadToken() (Token, error)
}

In practice the parser needs something different from Read, but the basic idea works.

We build a lexer around an interface that reads tokens.

9

The observation in practice

What is standard input? An input source.

What is an included file? An input source.

What is a macro invocation? An input source.

Each of these implements the TokenReader interface.

10

TokenReader

type TokenReader interface {
    // Next returns the next token.
    Next() ScanToken
    // The following methods all refer to the most recent token returned by Next.
    // Text returns the original string representation of the token.
    Text() string
    // File reports the source file name of the token.
    File() string
    // Line reports the source line number of the token.
    Line() int
    // Col reports the source column number of the token.
    Col() int
}

Parser calls Next, then can ask about the token: what is, where it is.
ScanToken is just text/scanner.Token with tweaks.

Note: No Peek. This has no lookahead.

11

Tokenizer

Tokenizer, the foundational TokenReader, turns a text/scanner.Scanner into a TokenReader. 

// A Tokenizer is a simple wrapping of text/scanner.Scanner, configured
// for our purposes and made a TokenReader. It forms the lowest level,
// turning text from readers into tokens.
type Tokenizer struct {
    tok      ScanToken // Most recent token.
    s        *scanner.Scanner
    line     int
    fileName string
}

func NewTokenizer(name string, r io.Reader, file *os.File) *Tokenizer

Either the reader or the file may be nil.

Tokenizer implements TokenReader

12

Tokenizer.Next

To give the flavor: 

func (t *Tokenizer) Next() ScanToken {
    s := t.s
    for {
        t.tok = ScanToken(s.Scan())
        if t.tok != scanner.Comment {
            break
        }
        length := strings.Count(s.TokenText(), "\n")
        t.line += length
        histLine += length
        // For now, just discard all comments.
    }
    // Special processing for '\n' etc. elided.
    return t.tok
}
13

Tokenizer.Text

func (t *Tokenizer) Text() string {
    switch t.tok {
    case LSH:  // Special handling of odd tokens used by ARM.
        return "<<"
    case RSH:
        return ">>"
    case ARR:
        return "->"
    case ROT:
        return "@>"
    }
    return t.s.TokenText()
}

LSH etc. are the reason for ScanToken: the set of tokens is a superset of the underlying type text/scanner.Token.

14

Macro definitions

It's easy to see how files work: NewTokenizer can do that.

What about a macro definition? 

#define A(arg) 27+(arg)

Becomes the tokens 

27 + ( arg )

When we encounter A(x), we substitute the argument and get 

27 + ( x )

Use a slice of tokens and store them in a Macro struct. 

type Macro struct {
    name   string   // The #define name.
    args   []string // Formal arguments.
    tokens []Token  // Body of macro.
}
15

Slice

// A Slice reads from a slice of Tokens.
type Slice struct {
    tokens   []Token
    fileName string
    line     int
    pos      int
}

Implements TokenReader. 

func (s *Slice) Next() ScanToken {
    s.pos++
    if s.pos >= len(s.tokens) {
        return scanner.EOF
    }
    return s.tokens[s.pos].ScanToken
}

To invoke a macro, substitute the actuals for the formals and make a Slice.

16

Command-line flags

A command-line flag -D can define a macro before execution: 

go tool asm -D 'macro=value' file.s

That's easy! 

var DFlag MultiFlag
flag.Var(&DFlag, "D", "predefined symbol D=identifier...")

type MultiFlag []string // Implements flag.Value, allows multiple settings.

predefine(DFlag)
17

Predefined macros

// predefine installs the macros set by the -D flag on the command line.
func predefine(defines MultiFlag) map[string]*Macro {
    macros := make(map[string]*Macro)
    for _, name := range defines {
        value := "1"
        i := strings.IndexRune(name, '=')
        if i > 0 {
            name, value = name[:i], name[i+1:]
        }
        // Various error checks elided.
        macros[name] = &Macro{
            name:   name,
            args:   nil, // No arguments allowed.
            tokens: Tokenize(value), // Turn the value into tokens.
        }
    }
    return macros
}

The return value is the initial symbol table of macros.

18

The big picture

We know how to:

But how does it fit together?
Which implementation TokenReader does the parser see?

Consider

It's a stack! Push new input, pop at EOF.

19

Stack

// A Stack is a stack of TokenReaders. As the top TokenReader hits EOF,
// it resumes reading the next one down.
type Stack struct {
    tr []TokenReader
}

// Push adds tr to the top (end) of the input stack. (Popping happens automatically.)
func (s *Stack) Push(tr TokenReader) {
    s.tr = append(s.tr, tr)
}

func (s *Stack) Next() ScanToken {
    tos := s.tr[len(s.tr)-1]
    tok := tos.Next()
    for tok == scanner.EOF && len(s.tr) > 1 {
        // Pop the topmost item from the stack and resume with the next one down.
        s.tr = s.tr[:len(s.tr)-1]
        tok = s.Next()
    }
    return tok
}
20

The Input type

// Input is the main input: a stack of readers and some macro definitions.
// It also handles #include processing (by pushing onto the input stack)
// and parses and instantiates macro definitions.
type Input struct {
    Stack
    includes        []string  // Directories in which to look for #includes
    macros          map[string]*Macro
    text            string // Text of last token returned by Next.
    ...
}

Note the embedding of Stack: Input is a wrapping of the Stack implementation of TokenReader.
The parser uses a single instance of Input as its TokenReader.

21

Example: #include processing

Some error handling elided for brevity. 

func (in *Input) include() {
    // Find and parse file name, which is next token, a string.
    tok := in.Stack.Next()
    name, _ := strconv.Unquote(in.Stack.Text())
    in.expectNewline("#include") // Checks that a newline comes now.
    // Push tokenizer for file onto stack.
    fd, err := os.Open(name)
    if err != nil {
        for _, dir := range in.includes {
            fd, err = os.Open(filepath.Join(dir, name))
            if err == nil {
                break
            }
        }
    }
    in.Push(NewTokenizer(name, fd, fd))
}
22

Macro definition

Macro definition is similar but more complex because of the variety of forms.
Must deal with constants, empty values, macros with arguments, etc.

The end result is to build a Macro value and install it in Input.macros.

23

The final piece: Input.Next

Here is the implementation of a CPP input stream using these types.
(Error handling mostly elided for brevity.) 

func (in *Input) Next() ScanToken {
    // If we cannot generate a token after 100 macro invocations, we're in trouble.
    for nesting := 0; nesting < 100; {
        tok := in.Stack.Next()
        switch tok {
        case '#':
            in.hash()
        case scanner.Ident:
            // Is it a macro name?
            name := in.Stack.Text()
            macro := in.macros[name]
            if macro != nil {
                nesting++
                in.invokeMacro(macro)
                continue
            }
            fallthrough
        default:
            // Continued on next slide.
24

Input.Next part 2

func (in *Input) Next() ScanToken {
            // Continued from previous slide.
        default:
            if tok == scanner.EOF && len(in.ifdefStack) > 0 {
                // We're skipping text but have run out of input with no #endif.
                in.Error("unclosed #ifdef or #ifndef")
            }
            if in.enabled() {
                in.text = in.Stack.Text()
                return tok
            }
        }
    }
    in.Error("recursive macro invocation")
    return 0
}
25

Initializing and running the lexer

// NewInput returns an Input from the given path.
func NewInput(name string) *Input {
    return &Input{
        // include directories: look in source dir, then -I directories.
        includes:        append([]string{filepath.Dir(name)}, IFlag...),
        macros:          predefine(DFlag),
    }
}

To run, call in.Push to put the input file (or os.Stdin) on the stack.

Then the lexer runs until the Stack is empty.

26

Summary

Interfaces give programs structure.

Interfaces encourage design by composition.

Interfaces enable and enforce clean divisions between components.

And a final tip of the hat to text/scanner under it all.

27

Thank you

Sydney Go Meetup

15 September 2016

Rob Pike

Google

@rob_pike

+RobPikeTheHuman

http://golang.org/

Use the left and right arrow keys or click the left and right edges of the page to navigate between slides.
(Press 'H' or navigate to hide this message.)