Installation issues

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select the version of CUP, you would like to obtain:

Legal issues

As long as the copyright notice appears in the distributed product, you can freely use CUP:

Usage

CUP comes with a generator part and a runtime part. Working with CUP comprises two phases:

Parser generation

Parser generation is done by creating a .cup file, that represents a parser specification. These specifications need to be processed by the parser generator. This can be achieved with a call like java -jar java-cup-11b.jar myparserspec.cup. This will create the corresponding parser as a .java file, that can be integrated into Java projects as usual.

Parser runtime

During parser runtime, the generated parser needs a few classes, on which it is dependent. These classes are contained in the java-cup-11b-runtime.jar file. This Java package needs to be included into the target project's classpath. The original generator package java-cup-11b.jar however does not need to be distributed alongside the target project.

Integration with ANT

CUP comes with an ANT task, so you can integrate it with any Java environment, that supports build.xml based project files. CUP needs to generate sources, that have to be integrated into the main project sources, before compilation can succeed. This can be achieved, by introducing a target for generated sources, on which the main compilation target depends. Additionally, you should consider to clean up your generated sources, whenever the project itself is cleaned. Basic support for this is sketched in the following build script. You can also see, how the scanner generator JFlex is integrated into the same build. 

<project    name="Compiler" default ="compile" basedir=".">
  <property name="cup"      location="src/cup"      />
  <property name="jflex"    location="src/jflex"    />
  <property name="java"     location="src/java"     />
  <property name="classes"  location="bin"          />
  <property name="lib"      location="lib"          />
  <property name="tools"    location="tools"        />

  <taskdef  name="jflex" classname="JFlex.anttask.JFlexTask"   classpath="${tools}/JFlex.jar"   />
  <taskdef  name="cup"   classname="java_cup.anttask.CUPTask"  classpath="${tools}/java-cup-11b.jar"  />

  <target name="generate">
    <jflex  file="${jflex}/Scanner.jflex" destdir="${java}" />
    <cup srcfile="${cup}/Parser.cup"      destdir="${java}"
          parser="Parser"                 interface="true" locations="false" />
  </target>


  <path id="libraries"> <files includes="${lib}/java-cup-11b-runtime.jar" /> </path>

  <target name="compile" depends="generate">
    <javac srcdir="${java}" destdir="${classes}" > <classpath refid="libraries" /> </javac>
  </target>

  <target name="clean">
    <delete file="${java}/Parser.java" />
    <delete file="${java}/sym.java" />
    <delete file="${java}/Scanner.java" />
    <delete dir="${classes}" />
  </target>
</project>

We have also prepared a very minimalistic project, to be used as a starting ground for your own project; you can get it from here!