Cobol grammar?

Hi all,
I have to create a parser for Cobol AS/400. Because it's very
difficult to find a complete grammar definition for this language, I
wonder if there is a way for describing a grammar (BNF, EBNF,...) that
tokenize only some specific rules and ignore all the rest.
Many Thanks
Matteo.

Hi Matteo,

there are fuzzy parsers, robust parsers (based on island grammars),
tolerant parsers (based on skeleton grammars), and more.

Many pointers in http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/ctp/

Having worked in this context, I would consider this still somewhat as
a black art. It is listed in some ways in the grammarware agenda (2nd
edition): http://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/agenda/

Ralf


matteo wrote:

>Hi all,
>I have to create a parser for Cobol AS/400. Because it's very
>difficult to find a complete grammar definition for this language, I
>wonder if there is a way for describing a grammar (BNF, EBNF,...) that
>tokenize only some specific rules and ignore all the rest.