The C programming language
ECOOP '01 Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
OOPSLA '04 Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
abc: an extensible AspectJ compiler
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
Better extensibility through modular syntax
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Declarative, formal, and extensible syntax definition for aspectJ
Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages
The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages
Context-aware scanning for parsing extensible languages
GPCE '07 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
The jastadd extensible java compiler
Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications
Jeannie: granting java native interface developers their wishes
Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications
The JastAdd system — modular extensible compiler construction
Science of Computer Programming
MontiCore: a framework for the development of textual domain specific languages
Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Verifiable composition of deterministic grammars
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
DSL evolution through composition
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Reflection, AOP and Meta-Data for Software Evolution
Staged static techniques to efficiently implement array copy semantics in a MATLAB JIT compiler
CC'11/ETAPS'11 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Compiler construction: part of the joint European conferences on theory and practice of software
McLAB: enabling programming language, compiler and software engineering research for matlab
Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion
McSAF: a static analysis framework for MATLAB
ECOOP'12 Proceedings of the 26th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
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Compiler toolkits make it possible to rapidly develop compilers and translators for new programming languages. Although there exist elegant toolkits for modular and extensible parsers, compiler developers must often resort to ad-hoc solutions when extending or composing lexers. This paper presents MetaLexer, a new modular lexical specification language and associated tool. MetaLexer allows programmers to define lexers in a modular fashion. MetaLexer modules can be used to break the lexical specification of a language into a collection smaller modular lexical specifications. Control is passed between the modules using the concept of meta-tokens and meta-lexing. MetaLexer modules are also extensible. MetaLexer has two key features: it abstracts lexical state transitions out of semantic actions and it makes modules extensible by introducing multiple inheritance. We have constructed a MetaLexer tool which converts MetaLexer specifications to the popular JFlex lexical specification language and we have used our tool to create lexers for three real programming languages and their extensions: AspectJ (and two AspectJ extensions), MATLAB (and the AspectMatlab extension), and MetaLexer itself. The new specifications are easier to read, are extensible, and require much less action code than the originals.