The Syntax Lanugage
The Syntax Language is one of the two languages that are built into Storm by default. It is stored
in files with the extension bnf. In contrast to Basic Storm, the Syntax Language is not a general
purpose language. Rather, it is a domain specific language for declaring BNF grammar and transforms
that specifies how to interpret the grammar.
As with Basic Storm, the Syntax Language is designed to be extensible. For example, it is possible to create syntax extensions to the Syntax Language in itself and Basic Storm. Furthermore, the Syntax Language is designed to make it easy to create other extensible languages since the Syntax Language provides both a means of extending the syntax of a language, and a way to specify the semantics of the extension at the same time. With the help of Storm, The Syntax Language achieves this in a typesafe manner, all the way from the source text to the abstract syntax tree of the target language.
The remainder of this section describes the Syntax Language in full. Since the Syntax Language deals with many similar terms, readers are encouraged to start by looking at the terminology section of the manual.
Note: This section focuses on the syntax language as it is used to parse and compile source code. As such, the explanations are aimed towards usage with the main parser in Storm. Storm also provides more restricted but more efficient parsers in the parser library that are often more suitable for application code. These parsers also use the Syntax Language, but with some minor differences to the parsing process and semantics.
Finally, a note for the curious reader: all code generation in the Syntax Language is implemented using Basic Storm: The Syntax Language creates abstract syntax trees in Basic Storm and thus utilizes the logic in Basic Storm to handle the low-level code generation. This is possible even though Basic Storm depends on the Syntax Language to parse source code.