psyn

about

psyn (POLON Syntax Notation) is minimalistic syntax description format. psyn is:

• Format for people, not machines
• Very easy to adapt/learn (you can learn psyn in ~10 minutes)
• Very simple (there are only 3 core components, rest are derivatives)
• Universal (psyn can fit into tiny CLI's as well as into assemblers/languages)

psyn DOES/IS NOT:

• Standalone file format
• Format to generate ready parsers
• Inform user of everything (it only presents shape of syntax, rest is informed by author)

It aims to solve following problem:

How to inform user of syntax of tool in a way that is expressive, minimal and easy to understand?

entirety of format

psyn v1.1

psyn v1.1 is currently latest version of psyn.

nodes

• <VALUE>: variable value
• [VALUE]: optional value
• VALUE: static value
• [<VALUE>]: optional variable data

IMPORTANT: if any node is put inside string literals (""), then you can consider it just text.

abbreviations

Abbreviations are used (as name implies) to abbreviate node combination. Let's take a look at example of following assembly code that can be described using PSYN format.

mov rax, rcx

Here we can use two abbreviations, that is: X86Instruction and X86Register. In PSYN format these are declared using *ABBREVIATION_NAME* = <NODE>.

Shortened declaration of these 2 abbreviations:

*X86Instruction* = MOV, [...]
*X86Register* = RAX, RCX, [...]

If abbreviation has any variable data, its name must be put inside parentheses (()).

Example Declaration:

*SomeAbbreviation*(SOMEVAR) = <SOMEVAR>

If we now want to reference it (with some value):

*SomeOtherAbbreviation* = *SomeAbbreviation*("Hello") World

credits

psyn was made by matissoss for POLON project and licensed under MIT license.