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When writing a compiler, it is useful to include the ability to dump the abstract syntax tree in a human readable format, for debugging purposes. This output might also be useful for other tools like IDEs and code analyzers, so I might as well provide it as a documented feature.

Given that, what format would be the most useful? It doesn't make much difference to me as long as I can eyeball it, so I might as well provide e.g. whatever other tools would find easiest to read.

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    if your syntax is context free you can use xml Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 17:03
  • Y'know, I'm just going out on a limb to be different here--When I wrote a compiler, I used a lot of different things. A dump of the AST wasn't one of them. You will run into very challenging problems when writing a compiler, and by comparison, you should find your AST to relatively simple. Compared to other debugging you will run into, the AST just works :) Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 19:33

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There are lots of viewers for the DOT file format. It is fairly simple to output ( plain text ) and produces ( depending on the viewer ) adequate to very nicely formatted output.

I believe DOT is what ANTLRWorks uses for its AST visualization.

I don't know what "tools" you are referring to reading the output, but something hierarchical like Xml Orientend Gcc AST ANalyzer or some equivalent JSON output would probably work as a generic input format to some visualization tool you might create.

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  • What would be the target audience for that? I had been assuming parties other than myself would be more interested in having the data for input to tools rather than viewing by eye on a graph display, is this not the case? Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 17:33
  • "as I can eyeball it" can't get more eyeball friendly than plain text that can be viewed as nice orgainized graphics really easily. Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 17:43
  • I've ended up using XML. Works fine as an eyeball format for me, code to pretty-print it was already available, and if and when anyone wants to parse it, code for that is already available as well. Commented Mar 9, 2012 at 22:41
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I'd suggest taking a look at s-expressions.

The tooling side is a bit weak, but there seems to be a tool to convert s-expressions to DOT files.

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