ProB Parsers Library

This is an umbrella project for the following parsers and libraries used by ProB:

• bparser: Parser for classical B.
• ltlparser: Parsers for LTL and CTL formulas. The parsers delegate formulas in { } to a formalism specific parser, e.g. to the classical B parser.
• parserbase: Library for uniform access to the formal language parsers. This is used to allow embedding different languages into LTL formulas.
• unicode: Lexer that transforms Event-B expressions and predicates between ASCII, Unicode and LaTeX syntax.
• eventbstruct: Parser for the Camille structural syntax for Event-B.
• theorymapping: Parser for theory mapping files (translation of Event-B operators to Prolog predicates).
• prologlib: Library to construct and manipulate well-formed Prolog terms.
• cliparser: Command-line interface for the B and LTL parsers. For internal use only by ProB's Prolog core (probcli).
• answerparser: Parser for a subset of Prolog term syntax, used to read answers from the ProB Prolog core (probcli) in socket-server mode. For internal use only by the ProB Java API and the ProB plugin for Rodin.

The following subprojects were formerly part of this repo:

• eventbalg: Extended version of the Camille eventbstruct parser, with added support for procedures. Now moved into the ProB 2 Event-B Algorithm DSL library. The last release as part of probparsers was version 2.12.5.
• translator: Replaced by the value-translator project. The last release as part of probparsers was version 2.9.23.
• typechecker: Java-based classical B typechecker. No longer maintained - last release was version 2.9.32. Note that the normal ProB typechecker is part of prob_prolog and is unrelated to this subproject.
• voparser: Now maintained in the separate vo_parser repository.

Using

Releases are on Maven Central, Snapshots on Sonatype Snapshots.

You can include the different parsers in a Gradle build script like this:

final parserVersion = "2.13.5"
dependencies {
	implementation group: "de.hhu.stups", name: "bparser", version: parserVersion
	implementation group: "de.hhu.stups", name: "ltlparser", version: parserVersion
	implementation group: "de.hhu.stups", name: "parserbase", version: parserVersion
}

Depending on your needs, you may remove parsers from the list or include additional ones. If you use more than one parser, you must use the same version number for all of them! This is ensured in the above code by storing the parser version in a variable.

You can also use the JAR probcliparser.jar built for ProB and distributed with ProB (inside its lib folder). Here is how to obtain help for using the command-line parser:

$ java -jar probcliparser.jar --help
BParser (version 2.13.5, commit 0d922cf55c3d019b40f71170e97197979a02ae8e)
usage: java -jar probcliparser.jar [options] <BMachine file>

Available options are:
-v              Verbose output during lexing and parsing
-time           Output time used for complete parsing process
-pp             Pretty Print in B format on standard output
-prolog         Show AST as Prolog term
-lineno         Put line numbers into prolog terms
-out            Specify output file
-version        Print the parser version and exit
-h              Print the parser help and exit
-help           Print the parser help and exit
--help          Print the parser help and exit
-compactpos     Use new more compact Prolog position terms
-fastprolog     Show AST as Prolog term for fast loading (Do not use this representation in your tool! It depends on internal representation of Sicstus Prolog and will very likely change arbitrarily in the future!)
-prepl          Enter parser-repl. Should only be used from inside ProB's Prolog Core.
-checkname      The name of a machine have to match file name (except for the file name extension)
-printstacksize print the locally available size of the call stack at runtime

You probably also want to set the path to the stdlib folder of ProB (containing files like LibraryStrings.def):

java -Dprob.stdlib=../stdlib/ -jar probcliparser.jar MyBMachine.mch

Building

If you have made local modifications to the parser code and want to use the modified parser libraries in your project, you need to build the parser locally.

First, you need to ensure that your project depends on the latest version of the parser (which is defined at the top of the probparsers build.gradle). This version should end in SNAPSHOT. If you depend on an older version of the parser, your local changes will not take effect.

If your project uses Gradle, the best way to do this is using a composite build. This can be done by passing the option --include-build /path/to/probparsers to your project's Gradle build. For example, assuming that your Gradle project has a standard run task, you can run the following command in your project's directory (not in the probparsers directory!) to start it with the local version of your parser:

$ ./gradlew --include-build /path/to/probparsers run

If your project uses a different build tool (e. g. Maven), you should instead publish the parser libraries to your local Maven repository. This is done by running the following command in the probparsers directory (not in your project's directory):

$ ./gradlew publishToMavenLocal

For probcli

If you are building probcli from source and want to include a local version of the parser, you can pass SNAPSHOT=1 GRADLE="./gradlew --include-build /path/to/probparsers" to the make call. This makes probcli's internal Gradle build use your local version of the parser instead of downloading a pre-built version.

Testing

If you have made changes to any of the parsers, please run the test suites using ./gradlew check to ensure that your changes are working as expected and do not break existing behavior. The tests are also run automatically by our CI system.

Bugs

Please report bugs and feature requests on our bug tracker.

Contributors

The libraries contain contributions from (in alphabetical order) Jens Bendisposto, Marc Büngener, Fabian Fritz, Dominik Hansen, Sebastian Krings, Michael Leuschel, Daniel Plagge, David Schneider

License

The ProB Parser Library source code is distributed under the Eclipse Public License - v 1.0 (see epl-v10.html)

The Parser Library comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND ! This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. The author(s) do not accept responsibility to anyone for the consequences of using it or for whether it serves any particular purpose or works at all. No warranty is made about the software or its performance.

(c) 2011-2020 STUPS group, University of Düsseldorf