CENG 442 Project (Part 1)
Assigned: March 04, 2015
Due: March 29, 2015
Definition and Lexical Analysis of a Robot Programming Language
This year's project is about the design of a new programming language for controlling a
mobile robot. Suppose that you are working as part of a research team building a robotic
platform. Your colleagues in the mechanical engineering department are almost done with the
construction of a robot to be deployed in Mars. This robot will be capable of moving foward
and back, turning in place, grabbing/releasing objects as well as sending/receiving data
to/from a supervisor. The robot also has various sensors to perceive the environment,
returning floating point values associated with their measurements. The robot can turn 1
degree at a time, and move forward or back in steps of 1mm. Your team in the CS department
is asked to design a Programming Language to for this robot.
The project will be completed in two parts. The first part (this assignment) involves the design
of the syntax for your programming language including at least the following components:
oSyntactic components for the top level program definition
oPrimitive functions: move (both forward and back), turn, grab, release, read sensor
given the sensor ID, send, receive.
oVariable names,
oAssignment operator,
oArithmetic expressions,
oConditional statements (e.g., if-then, if-then,else)
oLoops (e.g., for, while),
oSyntactic components for program and function definitions and function calls,
oComments
Your design should take the form of a BNF grammar, precisely defining the language based
on your token definitions used as terminal symbols. We expect your group to do the following
for your solution to this project:
oGive a name to your robot programming language
oInclude in your report, a summary of tokens that are used by the syntax of your
language as terminal symbols
oInclude in your report, the grammar for your language in BNF form.
oWith the main components of your language in place, write a scanner (lexical
analyzer) using the lex tool available on Linux/Unix systems. The scanner is expected
to read the input stream and output a sequence of tokens corresponding to the lexemes
as defined above. But, since at this point, you do not have the necessary tools to write
a full-blown parser, test your scanner by having it print messages on the screen
corresponding to recognized tokens. For example, if your language supports an
expression such as ... 1.45+453.43*32.2 ..., it would generate the output ... FLOAT
PLUS FLOAT MULT FLOAT ... on the screen.
