How to explain ENDF-6 to computers: A formal ENDF format description language
Abstract
The ENDF-6 format, widely used worldwide for storing and disseminating nuclear data, is managed by the Cross Sections Evaluation Working Group (CSEWG) and fully documented in the ENDF-6 formats manual. This manual employs a combination of formal and natural language, introducing the possibility of ambiguity in certain parts of the format specification. To eliminate the possibility of ambiguity, this contribution proposes a generalization of the formal language used in the ENDF-6 formats manual, which is precisely defined in extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF). This formalization also offers several other advantages, notably reducing the complexity of creating and updating parsing and validation programs for ENDF-6 formatted files. Moreover, the availability of a formal description enables the automatic mapping of the low-level ENDF-6 representation, provided by a sequence of numbers, to a more human-friendly hierarchical representation with variable names. Demonstrating these advantages, almost the entire ENDF-6 format description has been translated into the proposed formal language, accompanied by a reference implementation of a parser/translator. This implementation leverages the formal format specification to enable reading, writing, and validating ENDF-6 formatted files.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.08249,
title = {How to explain ENDF-6 to computers: A formal ENDF format description language},
author = {Georg Schnabel and Daniel Lopez Aldama and Roberto Capote},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.08249},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
31 pages