Proofs and pedagogy; science and systems: The grammar tool box

GTB (the Grammar Tool Box) is the tool that underpins our investigations into generalised parsing. Our goal is to produce a system that supports systematic investigation of various styles of generalised parsing in a way that allows meaningful comparisons between them in a repeatable and easily accessible fashion whilst also allowing: (i) new theoretical ideas to be generated and explored; (ii) production quality parsers to be generated and (iii) humane pedagogy. GTB comprises a language (LC) with various kinds of built-in grammar and automata related objects, and a set of black-box methods written in C++ that provide implementations of grammar transforms, automata construction algorithms, parsing and recognition algorithms, and a variety of visualisation aids. In this paper we focus on the overall rationale for the GTB framework; the GTB design goals; and some detailed operational flows that are supported by GTB.