Reserved Sequences (Keywords)

The following character sequences are considered reserved, and should be yield a distinct token (rather than be counted as an identifier).

and

bool

else

false

file

if

immutable

int

or

return

sink

thrash

true

void

while

Identifiers

Any sequence of one or more letters and/or digits, and/or underscores, starting with a letter or underscore, should be treated as an identifier token. Identifiers must not be reserved sequences, but may include a proper substring that is a reserved word, e.g. while1 is an identifier but while is not.

Integer Literals

Any sequence of of one or more digits yields an integer literal token as long as it is not part of an identifer or string.

String Literals

Any string literal (a sequence of zero or more string characters surrounded by double quotes) should yield a string literal token. A string character is either

• an escaped character: a backslash followed by any one of the following characters:
  1. n
  2. t
  3. a double quote
  4. another backslash
  or
• a single character other than newline or double quote or backslash.

Examples of legal string literals:

""
"&!88"
"use \n to denote a newline character"
"use \" to  for a quote and \\ for a backslash"

Examples of things that are not legal string literals:

"unterminated
"also unterminated \"
"backslash followed by space: \ is not allowed"
"bad escaped character: \a AND not terminated

Symbol Operators

Any of the following character symbol sequences constitute a distinct token:

=
:
,
+
-


==
>>
>
>=
[
<<


\\(-o-)//
{
<
<=
(
!


!=
--
++
]
}
)


;
...
/
*

Comments

Text starting with # up to the end of the line is a comment (except of course if those characters are inside a string literal). For example:

 
# this is a comment
# and so is # this
# and so is # this %$!#

The scanner should recognize and ignore comments (there is no COMMENT token).

Whitespace

Spaces, tabs, and newline characters are whitespace. Whitespace separates tokens and changes the character counter, but should otherwise be ignored (except inside a string literal).

Illegal Characters

Any character that is not whitespace and is not part of a token or comment is illegal.

Length Limits

No limit may be assumed on the lengths of identifiers, string literals, integer literals, comments, etc. other than those limits imposed by the underlying implementation of the compiler's host language.

For the most part, the token to produce should be self-explanatory. For example, the + symbol should produce the CROSS token, the -  symbol should produce the DASH token, etc. The set of tokens can be found in frontend.hh or in the switch in tokens.cpp. The LCURLY token refers to a left curly brace, {. the RCURLY refers to a right curly brace, }.

The lexical structure of TBA is fairly straightforward, and largely similar to C. There are a few notable details, some of which are departures from C:

• The sequence \\(-o-)// produces the THRASH token.
• The sequence ... produces the SINK token.
• The sequence >> and << produce INPUT and OUTPUT, respectively.
• The sequences thrash, and sink, are keywords of the language. They produce the THRASH, and SINK, tokens, respectively.
• The sequence file produces the FILE token
• The string && and || are NOT in the language . Instead "logical and" is represented by the string and and "logical or" is represented by the string or.