Parsing Expression Grammars

Parsing Expressions Grammar PEG are a (no longer so) new approach to parsing. Clibutl offers a set of functions to write parsers in C without having to use an external "parser generator". Rather than a dry list of functions, I'll present here a short tutorial on how to build a simple parser. The...

Exceptions Handling - Mechanics

I've posted (quite some time ago) a description of the try/catch blocks provided by clibutl. I guess it's now the time to look under the hood and see at the implementation. Below is the code, we'll go through it in the following sections. typedef struct utl_jb_s { jmp_buf jmp; struct...

Tracing Tests

Having read an interesting blog article by Kartik Agaram about using traces for testing, I decided to add this capability to c-libutl. On top of the existing logging functions: logerror() for messages that report about critical failures; logwarning() for messages that report about potential issues...

Finite State Machines in C

FSM in C are often implemented through loop (while or for), switch and control variables. This approach has the biggest disadvantage that is almost impossible from the code to understand the original FSM diagram. That's why c-libutl offers simple macros to implement FSM with a 1-to-1 relationship with...

Exception handling in C

Adding exception handling in C is a rather controversial topic. Some think that exceptions are pure evil and should never be considered, others say that those wanting to use exceptions should leave the realm of pure C and fly to C++ (or, even, Java). Others suggest that goto is a perfectly fine way...