Augmenting Parsers to Support Incrementality
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Handling Operator Precedence in Arithmetic Expressions with Tree Transformations
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
The Cornell program synthesizer: a syntax-directed programming environment
Communications of the ACM
Incremental compilation in Magpie
SIGPLAN '84 Proceedings of the 1984 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction
The design of a language-directed editor for block-structured languages
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA symposium on Text manipulation
GNOME: An introductory programming environment based on a family of structure editors
SDE 1 Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments
Parsing for structural editors
SFCS '80 Proceedings of the 21st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
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This article describes an algorithm for incremental parsing of expressions in the context of syntax-directed editors for programming languages. Since a syntax-directed editor represents programs as trees and statements and expressions as nodes in trees, making minor modifications in an expression can be difficult. Consider, for example, changing a '' + '' operator to a ''*'' operator or adding a short subexpression at a syntactically but not structurally correct position, such as inserting '') * (d'' at the # mark in'' (a + b # + c)''. To make these changes in a typical syntax-directed editor, the user must understand the tree structure and type a number of tree-oriented construction and manipulation commands. This article describes an algorithm that allows the user to think in terms of the syntax of the expression as it is displayed on the screen (in infix notation) rather than in terms of its internal representation (which is effectively prefix), while maintaining the benefits of syntax-directed editing. This algorithm is significantly different from other incremental parsing algorithms in that it does not involve modifications to a traditional parsing algorithm or the overhead of maintaining a parser stack or any data structure other than the syntax tree. Instead, the algorithm applies tree transformations, in real-time as each token is inserted or deleted, to maintain a correct syntax tree.