Semantic Actions

There are no constructs for semantic actions in 竜 TatSu grammars. This is on purpose, because semantic actions obscure the declarative nature of grammars and provide for poor modularization from the parser-execution perspective.

Semantic actions are defined in a class, and applied by passing an object of the class to the parse() method of the parser as the semantics= parameter. 竜 TatSu will invoke the method that matches the name of the grammar rule every time the rule parses. The argument to the method will be the AST constructed from the right-hand-side of the rule:

class MySemantics:
    def some_rule_name(self, ast):
        return ''.join(ast)

    def _default(self, ast):
        pass

If there’s no method matching the rule’s name, 竜 TatSu will try to invoke a _default() method if it’s defined:

def _default(self, ast):
    ...

Nothing will happen if neither the per-rule method nor _default() are defined.

The per-rule methods in classes implementing the semantics provide enough opportunity to do rule post-processing operations, like verifications (for inadequate use of keywords as identifiers), or AST transformation:

class MyLanguageSemantics:
    def identifier(self, ast):
        if my_lange_module.is_keyword(ast):
            raise FailedSemantics('"%s" is a keyword' % str(ast))
        return ast

For finer-grained control it is enough to declare more rules, as the impact on the parsing times will be minimal.

If preprocessing is required at some point, it is enough to place invocations of empty rules where appropriate:

myrule = first_part preproc {second_part} ;

preproc = () ;

The abstract parser will honor as a semantic action a method declared as:

def preproc(self, ast):
    ...