Attribute grammar specification languages, like many domain-specific languages, offer significant advantages to their users, such as high-level declarative constructs and domain-specific analyses. Despite these advantages, attribute grammars are often not adopted to the degree that their proponents envision. One practical obstacle to their adoption is a perceived lack of both domain-specific and general purpose language features needed to address the many different aspects of a problem. Here we describe Silver, an extensible attribute grammar specification system, and show how it can be extended with general purpose features such as pattern matching and domain-specific features such as collection attributes and constructs for supporting data-flow analysis of imperative programs.

This paper describes an extension to Lustre to support the analysis of globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) architectures. This extension consists of constructs for directly specifying the timeout automata used to describe asynchronous communication between processes represented by Lustre nodes. It is implemented using an extensible language framework based on attribute grammars that allows such extensions to be modularly defined so that they may be more easily composed with other language extensions.

In model-based development, a formal description of the software (the model) is the central artifact that drives other development activities. The availability of a modeling language well-suited for the system under development and appropriate tool support are of utmost importance to practitioners. Considering the diverse needs of different application domains, flexibility in the choice of modeling languages and tools may advance the industrial acceptance of formal methods. We describe a flexible modeling language framework by which language and tool developers may better meet the special needs of various users groups without incurring prohibitive costs. The framework is based on a modular and extensible implementation of languages features using attribute grammars and forwarding.