yagg - generates a string generator from a grammar

Given YACC-like and LEX-like input files, yagg generates a C++ program that
generates all strings of a user-specified length.  The YACC-like language
grammar file provides the grammar productions for string generation, along
with optional action blocks that can perform context-sensitive checks in order
to limit the generated strings.  The LEX-like terminal generator file provides
specifications that instruct the program how to generate strings for terminals
in the grammar.

If the programmer already has a YACC or Bison parser file, he or she only
needs to add "unaction" blocks to allow the recursive generator to undo the
side effects of the action blocks. If the programmer already has a LEX or FLEX
lexer input file, he or she only needs to remove extraneous code and replace
any regular expressions with one of the terminal generator specifications.

What's it good for? Automated testing, for one thing. Alan Karben at XML Team
is using yagg along with sports data to compute the likelihood of all possible
outcomes for certain play situations in baseball.


NEW IN THIS VERSION

Version 1.4001: Sun Apr 1 2007
- Added a section to the tutorial on controlling output formatting. (Thanks to
	Casiano Rodriguez Leon for the question.)
- Fixed a misspelling in the hexadecimal example's README.
- Updated the makefile version
- Fixed an assert failure that would occur if (1) a rule list has more than
	one nonterminal, (2) some nonterminal in the list except the last one had no
	strings for a given allocation, and (3) the last nonterminal had strings for
	the given allocation.
- Updated the Makefiles
- Updated the test cases for the pass-by-reference updates in 1.3000.
- Make it possible to call Print_Strings from anywhere in the program for
	debugging. Maybe I'll add a flag for it later.
- Added RBD example


MODULE DEPENDENCIES

- File::Temp
- File::Find
- File::Spec::Functions
- File::Path
- Storable
- Getopt::Std
- Text::Template
- Parse::Yapp
- Test::More

File::Temp, File::Find, File::Spec, Storable, and Getopt::Std are part of the
standard Perl distribution. 

You should be prompted to install missing modules automatically when you run
"perl Makefile.PL".


INSTALLATION

=> On Non-Windows (Unix/Cygwin/etc.) systems:

To install this package, change to the directory where you unarchived this
distribution and type the following:

  perl Makefile.PL
  make
  make test
  make install

You will be prompted to install this package into a non-default location. You
may wish to do this if you do not have access to the default perl installation
directories. See "perldoc -q own.*module" for more information.

You will also be prompted for the locations of key programs. All of these
programs are necessary, so be sure to provide paths to them.

If "make test" fails, please see the INSTALLATION PROBLEMS section below.

Note that you can also run the script directly from the current directory
before installing, like so:

  perl -Ilib yagg ...


INSTALLATION PROBLEMS

First, make sure that your program paths are correct. For example, you might
want to try using the same path as your compiler for the "ld" program.

If "make test" fails, run

  make test TEST_VERBOSE=1

and see which test(s) are failing. Please email, to the address below, the
output of the above command, as well as any output files, if any are noted in
the test output when the test fails. 


DOCUMENTATION

Just "perldoc yagg". After installation on Unix systems, you can also do "man
yagg".


HOMEPAGE

Visit http://yagg.sourceforge.net/ for the latest version, CVS access, and
more.


REPORTING BUGS

You can report bugs at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=126089.


COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2004 David Coppit. All rights reserved, save those granted by the license.


LICENSE

This code is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  See
the file LICENSE included in the distribution.


AUTHOR

David Coppit <david@coppit.org>