AN ENVIRONMENT FOR ENGINEERING EXTENDED AFFIX GRAMMAR ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Existing formalisms for the specification of programming environments are complex and strongly biased by the problems of environment generation. It has been investigated whether a simple two-level grammar, describing a programming language, can be used without further modification for the generation of an environment for that language. We believe that there is enough information in most language definitions - albeit implicitly - to generate most of the tools used in syntax-directed editors. This paper proposes some simple and elegant improvements in the use of place- holders and templates, and in the unparsing mechanism. Although the improvements are implemented in a completely newly designed prototype they can also be applied to existing syntax-directed editors to improve their workability.