Incremental evaluation for attribute grammars with application to syntax-directed editors

  • Authors:
  • Alan Demers;Thomas Reps;Tim Teitelbaum

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • POPL '81 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1981

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Abstract

A syntax-directed editor is a tool for structured program development. Such an editor can enforce syntactic correctness incrementally by restricting editing operations to legitimate modifications of the program's context-free derivation tree. However, not all language features can be described by the context-free formalism. To build editors that enforce non-context-free correctness, a more powerful specification technique is needed. In this paper we discuss the advantages of attribute grammars as a specification technique for a syntax-directed editing system. We also present an efficient algorithm for incrementally evaluating attributes as a program tree is derived.