This manual should be regarded as a guideline. Some of the features or functionality described is either not implemented yet, or does not work exactly as advertised. A good place to see what is and is not implemented is to run the regression test suite as the test names are indicative of features. The individual tests are also good starting points to find examples on how a specific feature works.

This document describes the design, features, implementation, usability, etc of an evolution in the constraint grammar formalism.

I have called this version of CG "VISL CG-3" since it implements the functionality of the VISL CG-2 variant of constraint grammar and is a general update of the grammar format and parser features that warrants a version bump. VISL CG-3 is feature-wise backwards compatible with CG-2 and VISLCG, and contains switches to enforce their respective behavior in certain areas.

Even before any other designing and development had started, the desire to include Unicode support was a strong requirement. By default, the codepage for the grammar file, input stream, and output stream is detected from the environment. Internally and through switches there is full support for Unicode and any other encoding known by the Unicode library. I have chosen the International Components for Unicode library as it provides strong cross-platform Unicode support with built-in regular expressions.

All public discussion, feature requests, bug reports, and talk of related technologies happen in the Constraint Grammar via Google Groups.