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I am studying formal languages and playing with writing my own parsers for them. I have a context free grammar parser already that works well. I am wondering if anyone can point me towards actually implemented examples of rewriters. For example, suppose I had the rules

WORD: [A-Z]+

QUOTE: "

And I wanted to input a lot of words,put quotes around each one, and write out the string. Or go back and forth. Something like this:

(WORD [' '])+ <--> (QUOTE WORD QUOTE [' '])+

That seems kind of possible to implement automatically without ambiguity, but I was hoping someone had seen something along that line that already exists.

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Stratego is a system that allows you to write term-rewrite rules and it will compile them for you. – Dave Clarke Nov 21 '12 at 12:00
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A link: strategoxt.org – Dave Clarke Nov 21 '12 at 12:26
Hi @Dave. I read up on it and it's pretty complex. Do you use it for anything? Can you describe the syntax for the above example? – Dan Gelder Nov 21 '12 at 12:59
I haven't used it for years, unfortunately. I always mean to, but never find the time. – Dave Clarke Nov 21 '12 at 15:08
Correct if I am wrong, but are you thinking in an imperative language? If so,consider using a functional language. – Guy Coder Nov 21 '12 at 15:25
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Thue language is based on string rewriting and it's just 179 lines of c code.

Pure is an LGPL'd functional language based on term rewriting.

Not an example, but a course with really complete slides on the theory of term rewriting systems.

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