Meta-programming with Concrete Object Syntax

  • Authors:
  • Eelco Visser

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • GPCE '02 Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Meta programs manipulate structured representations, i.e., abstract syntax trees, of programs. The conceptual distance between the concrete syntax meta-programmers use to reason about programs and the notation for abstract syntax manipulation provided by general purpose (meta-) programming languages is too great for many applications. In this paper it is shown how the syntax definition formalism SDF can be employed to fit any meta-programming language with concrete syntax notation for composing and analyzing object programs. As a case study, the addition of concrete syntax to the program transformation language Stratego is presented. The approach is then generalized to arbitrary meta-languages.