Daedalus is a flexible data description language for generating parsers with data dependencies.
Daedalus is implemented in Haskell, so to build it you'd need to setup a Haskell environment. An easy way to get this setup is to use ghcup. You need a Haskell compiler (recommended GHC 8.8.3), and a Haskell package installer (recommended Cabal 3.2).
The Daedalus interpreter, called daedalus is a good way to experiment
with, and learn the Daedlus language. To build and install the interpreter
you may use the command:
cabal install exe:daedalus --installdir=DIR \
--overwrite-policy=alwaysThis instructs cabal to build Daedlus and place a link to the binary
in directory DIR. The flag --overwrite-policy is optional and
instructs cabal to overwite existing links with the same name.
To run daedalus you need a Daedalus specification describing the
parser, and a file that should be parsed. For example, you could try
the following, assuming daedalus is in your path:
daedalus tests/midi/midi.ddl -i tests/midi/inputs/moz_k299.midiThe first argument to daedalus is a specification describing the midi
format and the -i flag specfies the input that should be parsed.
If the input is parsed successfully, then daedalus will display the
resulting semantic value. Otherwise, you should see a parse error describing
what went wrong.
The directory syntax-highlight contain Daedalus syntax hilighting
files for common editors.
The documentation for Daedlus is not yet complete, but you may read
more about the language in docs/UserGuide.pdf. The tests directory
contains numerous small examples of Daedlus specifications, of particular
interest might be subdirectories ppm (PPM image format),
sexp (S-expressions) and midi (MIDI messages).
At present we can translate Daedalus specifications into Haskell, so that the resulting parsers may be intergrated with Haskell applications. We are working on adding support for generating parsers in other languages as well. The parser generation functionality is very much in development at the moment.
The repositry contains two examples of Haskell applications using Daedalus parsers. They are both validators, for the ICC and PDF format respectively. You may install them using the commands:
cabal install exe:icc-parser --installdir=DIR
cabal install exe:pdf-hs-driver --installdir=DIRThe source code for the ICC validator is in icc-driver and the source
code for the PDF validator is in pdf-driver.
This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. HR0011-19-C-0073. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).