On Oct 30, 2007, at 9:18 AM, Oliver Bandel wrote:

Zitat von Angela Zhu <angela.zhu@cs.rice.edu>:

Hi all,

I have some problem with precedence declaration in OCaml parser.
If I what to say exponential(ATOB) is prior to *(STAR) and / (DIVIDE),
  * and / are prior to +(PLUS)  and -(MINUS),
I wrote the following in the parser:


/***** Precedence Rules  *****/
...
%left PLUS MINUS
%left STAR DIVIDE
%left ATOB
...

But I still have the following problems:
(1) It appears that the parser
reads "test = 2^2 + 7;" as "test = 2^9" instead of "test = 4+7", which
would follow the conventional order of operations.

(2)It also interprets "test = (1^2)/3 + 1;" as "test = (1 ^ 2
/ (3 + 1));"

Can any one help me to see why it happens? Why the precedence rules
doesn't work?
[...]

Precedences also can be created by sophisticated
organization of the grammar rules.
But I want to avoid this.

So, if your grammar rules may have a contradictory
meaning, then your parser works not as expected.

In general I would use the precedence-declarations only,
when you run into parser conflicts, if you don't use them.
When developing a grammr, I would recommend, first to start
with the grammar rules, and add precedence-/associatitivity-
declarations, at the end, if really necessary.


What is the rest of your mly-file?

A complete example would be helpful.
Here is part of my .mly file:
Beside the precedence issue, everything works fine.

 %{

open Past
open Parsing
open ParseError

let pi = 4.0 *. atan 1.0;;

let get_range n = {
  pos_start = Parsing.rhs_start_pos n;
  pos_end = Parsing.rhs_end_pos n;
}

let unclosed opening_name opening_num closing_name closing_num =
  raise(Error(Unclosed(get_range opening_num, opening_name,
                       get_range closing_num, closing_name)))
%}

/* List of all tokens the lexer can output */

...

%token PLUS
%token STAR
%token MINUS
%token DIVIDE
%token AND
%token OR
...

%token ATOB  /* A^B: exponential */
...


/***** Precedence Rules  *****/
%left PLUS MINUS  
%left STAR DIVIDE  
%left ATOB
%nonassoc prec_unary_minus


%start prog

%type <Past.pprog> prog

%%

/* Rules for parsing. The parsing rules should generally be in a */
/* one-to-one correspondence with the BNF */
/* type prog = Prog of consDeclare list * varDeclare list * inpDeclare list * sysDeclare list */




prog:

exp:
   LPAREN exp RPAREN          { $2 }
 | LPAREN exp error           { unclosed "(" 1 ")" 3 }

 | exp PLUS exp { Add($1, $3) }
 | MINUS exp  { Sub(Value(VFloat(0.0)), $2) }
 | exp MINUS exp             { Sub($1, $3) }
 | exp DIVIDE exp { Divide($1, $3) }
 | exp STAR exp              { Mult($1, $3) }
 | exp ATOB exp              { Atob($1, $3) }


 | value PLUS exp { Add(Value($1), $3) }
 | value MINUS exp             { Sub(Value($1), $3) }
 | value DIVIDE exp { Divide(Value($1), $3) }
 | value STAR exp              { Mult(Value($1), $3) }
 | value ATOB exp              { Atob(Value($1), $3) }


...

 | IDENT { Id($1) }
 | value { Value($1) }

 

;


...