Large scale source code manipulation is a cool thing! We needed that at some point for one prominent Borland Delphi 3/5 project. After looking around we did not find a complete grammar. So we developed it ourselves in the Code Linguine project.

Now we have in full:

• Borland Delphi Language Grammar for reading *.pas source files
• Borland Delphi DFM Grammar for reading *.dfm files that encode form layout

These grammars were built using modification to Version 4.1 of TPLY (Turbo Pascal Lex and Yacc), a compiler generator for Turbo Pascal and compatibles.

Writing or reverse engineering a language grammar is a very educational exercise. One has to learn all hidden tricks of the language in order to complete the grammar. We have all been using Delphi in depth since version 1.0, but none of us knew all the language features...