Article information

2022 , Volume 27, ¹ 3, p.125-140

Hmelnov A.E.

Algorithms and data structures for automatic generation of binary data reading and printing code from the data format specifications in the language FlexT

The language FlexT (acronym for Flexible Types) is designed for specification of binary data formats. Its main statements are data type definitions that resemble type definitions of imperative programming languages, but are more flexible. For example, the FlexT data types may contain subparts of variable size and may have parameters.

The primary purpose of the FlexT interpreter is to display the binary data in accordance with the format specification in a human-readable form. Typically the next step after studying some data format is to write a code for its processing. That’s why we have developed the data reading code generator, which completely automates this task for the substantial part of the data formats described in FlexT. It can generate both the data reading module and the test program. The program demonstrates the correct usage of the module for solving the data visualization task. In the paper we consider the main principles of our approach to code generation, the data structures that we use for representation of information about the generated code and the code generation algorithms.

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Keywords: specifications of binary data formats, declarative language, code generation, data reader, data visualization code

doi: 10.25743/ICT.2022.27.3.010

Author(s):
Hmelnov Alexey Evgenievich
PhD. , Associate Professor
Position: Head of Laboratory
Office: Matrosov Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences
Address: 664033, Russia, Irkutsk, 134 Lermontov str.
Phone Office: (3952) 45-30-71
E-mail: hmelnov@icc.ru
SPIN-code: 8041-3667

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Bibliography link:
Hmelnov A.E. Algorithms and data structures for automatic generation of binary data reading and printing code from the data format specifications in the language FlexT // Computational technologies. 2022. V. 27. ¹ 3. P. 125-140
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