# 1 Introduction

The Gump is a fictional `creature' in the children's novel ``The Marvelous Land of Oz'' by L. Frank Baum, sequel to ``The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' [Bau00]. It is a living flying machine assembled by the main characters from individually selected materials. The Tin Woodman fastens a gump's head to one end of the machine, explaining that it ``will show which is the front end of the Thing.''

Gump is also the name of the specification language and tool described in this handbook from the user's point of view. Like the gump's head in the novel, the language is used to specify front-ends in Oz, in this case the lexical and phrase structure of a language. The tool is the ``Powder of Life'' that generates executable programs (Oz class definitions) from such specifications.

## Overview

This manual consists of two parts. Chapter 2 describes the Gump Scanner Generator; Chapter 3 the Gump Parser Generator. Each chapter is divided in two sections, the first explaining the basic concepts by example and the second providing a detailed reference for the programmer.

## Acknowledgements

The specification language and the software tool have been designed and implemented as the subject of my Master's Thesis [Kor96] which has been supervised by Prof. Dr. Gert Smolka and Dipl.-Inform. Christian Schulte at the Programming Systems Lab at the Universität des Saarlandes, as well as by Prof. Dr. Hans-Wilm Wippermann at the University of Kaiserslautern.

The software makes use of the GNU variants of lex and yacc, called flex [Pax95] and bison [DS95] respectively.

Oz is the name of a programming language developed at the Programming Systems Lab at the Universität des Saarlandes. Mozart is an implementation of Oz.

The cover illustration has been drawn by Andreas Schoch.