Extending attribute grammars to support programming-in-the-large

  • Authors:
  • Josephine Micallef;Gail E. Kaiser

  • Affiliations:
  • Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ;Columbia Univ., New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Attribute grammars add specification of static semantic properties to context-free grammars, which, in turn, describe the syntactic structure of program units. However, context-free grammars cannot express programming-in-the-large features common in modern programming languages, including unordered collections of units, included units, and sharing of included units. We present extensions to context-free grammars, and corresponding extensions to attribute grammars, suitable for defining such features. We explain how batch and incremental attribute-evaluation algorithms can be adapted to support these extensions, resulting in a uniform approach to intraunit and interunit static semantic analysis and translation of multiunit programs.