The grammar is designed to achieve the following goals:
- Define a wide variety of file formats including filesystems.
- Provide a first-level parsing of files for an associated codec to then use a reference for further parsing.
- Provide a means of identifying a file based on its content.
- Serve as a basis for an "intelligent" hex viewer, which will have applications beyond AtomicityOS.
- Provide a means for basic file format or minor variant of an existing format to be added to the system without needing to write any code.
- Design a binary file parsing grammar that will have uses to a wider audience than just myself.
- Possibly have the format usable to save out files as well as load them.
Background
I have long been interested in file formats, and always wanted a means to easily define, modify, and play with files in an easy and responsive manner. There are a few hex viewer tools on the market that allow a structure definition to be applied to the data to visualise or extract values, but these tend to be rather limited. A number of groups have attempted to create a grammar to describe a binary file format, but these projects have either been abandoned, or commercial with a limited usefulness. So I have defined my own grammar (as with everything else) which is still evolving (I'm considering adding iterative loops) but is sufficiently complete to describe a host of formats in a breadth-first manner. This grammar allows me to make ad-hoc changes to how the structure of a given file is parsed and to see the results of those changes in real-time.
