README for Cheese 0.1 Alpha

1. What is Cheese

Cheese is a parser generator for Lua that uses Parsing Expression Grammars
(PEGs) [1] as its description formalism and Lua itself as a description language
for the parsers. It also includes a grammar for a parser that understands
the complete syntax of Lua 5.1 and generates ASTs. It also includes a dumper
that generates Lua code from these ASTs.

The current version is a prototype that generates parsers written in Lua, so
the generated parsers are very slow. The parser has been tested on several
Lua source files, but there may be hidden bugs.

The purpose of Cheese is  to investigate a more powerful and expressive
alternative to Lua patterns, without sacrificing readability and to provide
a dynamically extensible parser to the Lua language.

Plans for Cheese include a much faster implementation of the parsers,
a back-end for generating Lua opcodes from the ASTs, and a better
interface for extending the parser (currently it can only be extended by
direct manipulation of the grammar).

Cheese is free software. The contents of this distribution are Copyright
2006 Fabio Mascarenhas, and released through the MIT license.

2. Installation

In Unix systems, just type "make install" as root. If your Lua libraries are
not located in /usr/local/share/lua/5.1, please edit the provided Makefile
first.

Windows users should copy the files by hand. See the Makefile for where it
file should go.

3. Testing

To run a minimal test suite for the Lua parser (it stresses all the Cheese rules,
and the two implementations of strems provided) just type "make test".

4. Removal

In Unix systems, just type "make uninstall" as root. Windows users should
delete the files by hand.

5. Documentation

Please check the doc directory for extra documentation.

6. Changelog

This is the first public release.

7. Credits

Cheese is designed by Fabio Mascarenhas. You can contact the author
at mascarenhas@acm.org.

8. References

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/packrat/