GNOLL: Efficient Software for Real-World Dice Notation and Extensions

TL;DR

GNOLL is an open-source library that efficiently parses familiar dice notation syntax used in tabletop gaming, addressing limitations of existing implementations by being complete, robust, and easily integrable.

Contribution

It introduces an extended dice notation syntax and provides a practical, open-source implementation that improves upon prior incomplete or proprietary solutions.

Findings

GNOLL demonstrates competitive parsing performance.

The syntax extension covers more dice notation cases.

The library is easy to integrate into various applications.

Abstract

GNOLL ("GNOLL's Not *OLL") is a software library for dice notation. Unlike previous papers, GNOLL's dice notation syntax is focused on parsing a language that tabletop role-players and board gamers are already used to for specifying dice rolls in many popular software applications. Existing implementations of such a syntax are either incomplete, fragile, or proprietary, meaning that anyone hoping to use such syntax in their application likely needs to write their own solution. GNOLL is an open-source project using the compilation tool 'YACC' and lexical tool 'LEX' which can be integrated into many applications with relative ease. This paper explores GNOLL's extended dice notation syntax and its competitive performance.