Syntax-directed documentation for PL360

• Authors: Harlan D. Mills
• Venue: Communications of the ACM
• Year: 1970

The language PL360, together with its phrase structure grammar, is used as a concrete basis for illustrating an idea called syntax-directed documentation. This idea is: (1) to use the phrase structure of a program to define the structure of a formal documentation for that program; (2) to use the syntactic types and identifiers in the resulting structure to trigger the automatic formation of questions to the programmer, whose answers will become part of that documentation; and (3) to provide automatic storage and retrieval facilities so that other programmers who want to understand or modify the program can access the resulting documentation, which is cross-indexed in various ways by syntactic types and objects. A small PL360 program, already found in the literature, is worked out as an example.