Textual grammars are the human readable plain-text input grammars as described in the rest of this manual. Binary grammars are the compiled versions of textual grammars.

For the purpose of commercial distribution, textual grammars are terribly insecure; anyone can take your carefully constructed grammar and use it as a basis of their own work. Binary grammars are more secure in that it takes an active decompilation to get anything human readable, and even then it will be undocumented and look rather different from the original grammar.

As of release 0.8.9.3142, VISL CG-3 can create and use binary grammars. At this point they are basically memory dumps of the compiled grammars and can be trivially decompiled by modifying the sources a bit. Future releases will have options to strenghten the security of the binary grammars by excluding disused parts from the compilation.

As of release 0.9.7.5729, the speed difference between binary and textual is down to factor 2 slower, where previously it was factor 10. So there is no longer any pressing need to use binary grammars solely for their speed advantage.

To compile a textual grammar to a binary form, use

        vislcg3 --grammar inputgrammar.txt --grammar-only --grammar-bin binarygrammar.cg3b
      

(remember to set codepage if needed)

To later on use the binary grammar, simply do

        vislcg3 --grammar binarygrammar.cg3b
      

VISL CG-3 will auto-detect binary grammars in that the first 4 bytes of the file are ['C','G','3','B']. Binary grammars are neutral with regard to codepage and system endianness; to maximize portability of grammars, strings are stored in UTF-8 and all integers are normalized.