If you haven’t seen it already, we recently released a 100% JavaScript-only, client-side Excel library for Ignite UI and I’m super excited about it. It allows you to read, write, and manipulate Excel workbooks. You can even create and solve formulas, all from inside the browser!! It was released in 14.2 as a CTP so we could get your feedback on it, but we will be releasing a complete RTM version in 15.1. You can find…

In the previous article, we saw the dangling else ambiguity and how letting the grammar be ambiguous in that case can produce a cleaner syntax tree when parsing a document. But in most cases, you will probably want to remove ambiguities from a grammar. Or, as…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here.

This time I want to talk about another real world ambiguity that can occur when writing grammar rules. This one is known as the dangling else ambiguity and can happen if a language has an if-then-else construct with an optional else. C# is a good example of such a…

As I mentioned in a previous post, the format of EBNF special sequences has changed in the 13.1 version and it is not so easy to change over the 12.2 format to the new format by hand. So if you have already written an EBNF grammar using 12.2 and you want to upgrade to 13.1, I have created a utility to help you convert the file from the old format to the new.

One thing to note when converting is that regular expressions…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here and the next post can be found here.

Last time we saw how ambiguities can be removed from grammar rules for binary operator expressions, but the resulting syntax tree was relatively dense and contained a lot of nodes which can be ignored by code consuming the syntax…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here and the next post can be found here.

Defining binary operator grammar rules (as well as unary, ternary, and other arities) can be tricky and if not done correctly, can lead to global ambiguities all over the place. Let’s say we want to define a grammar for arithmetic…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here and the next post can be found here.

In the previous posts about ambiguities, I discussed the conflicts which can occur while parsing but only showed examples of local ambiguities. Other than the performance implications, you really don’t have to worry about local ambiguities…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here and the next post can be found here.

[After reading my previous post, a friend of mine, Doug Rubino, suggested I use the term “substitute” instead of “promote” for the strategy of removing ambiguities by placing a non-terminal’s production bodies into the contexts in…

This post is part of a series on the parsing framework provided by Infragistics starting in version 12.2. The previous post in the series can be found here and the next post can be found here.

As I mentioned in my first post, it is important to keep the number of ambiguities in a grammar to a minimum to ensure documents are parsed as quickly as possible. I’ll discuss a few common mistakes which can slow down the parser…

[Update: in the original wording of this post, I may have blurred the concepts of 'symbol' and 'token'. For the record, a symbol is either a terminal symbol, which represents an elementary textual unit in a grammar, or a non-terminal symbol, which represents zero or more symbols. A token is a unit of text read by the lexer which is associated with a terminal symbol. I have re-worded the post to make this distinction clearer…

This is the first in a series of posts I am going to write about the parsing framework shipped as a CTP in the 12.2 release of our WPF and Silverlight products. This framework is used internally by the new XamSyntaxEditor control on those platforms. This post will be an introduction to both parsing in general as well as the type of parser provided by us.

Introduction

The Infragistics parsing framework allows you to define…