What is this?

Lua parser implemented in OCaml using menhir.

Requirements

• OCaml
• menhir
• ocamlbuild

It is strongly recommended to use OPAM to setup your environment.

How to use

First invoke make to build main.byte, which counts the number of function definitions (just a sample application).

./main.byte "path to lua program"

Why conflicts?

You could see that when you build menhir warns that parser.mly has 2 shift/reduce conflicts. This ambiguity is inherent to the lua syntax. The following code snippet (excerpt from the lua manual https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.3) illustrates this situation:

a = b + c
(print or io.write)('done')

This statement could be read in two ways.

a = b + c;
(print or io.write)('done')

In this case, when the first open parenthesis is reached, reducing is occured and c is interpreted as some integer value.

The corresponding AST is

[ Assign ([Name "a"], [BinOp (Addition, PrefixExp (Var (Name "b")), PrefixExp (Var (Name "c")))])
; FunctionCall
   (Function
     (Exp
       (BinOp (LogicalOr, PrefixExp (Var (Name "print")),
         PrefixExp (Var (IndexTable (Var (Name "io"), LiteralString "write"))))),
     [LiteralString "done"]))]

a = b + (c(print or io.write)('done'))

In this case, when the first open parenthesis is reached, shifting is occured and (print or io.write) is interpreted as an argument to the function c.

The corresponding AST is

[ Assign ([Name "a"], [BinOp (Addition, PrefixExp (Var (Name "b")),
   PrefixExp
    (FunctionCallExp
      (Function
        (FunctionCallExp
          (Function (Var (Name "c"),
            [BinOp (LogicalOr, PrefixExp (Var (Name "print")),
              PrefixExp
               (Var (IndexTable (Var (Name "io"), LiteralString "write"))))])),
        [LiteralString "done"]))))])]

The another conflict is almost same as the above code, but starts from the function call instead of the assignment (e.g. foo(x)(bar or baz)(z)).