Silver: an Extensible Attribute Grammar System
Date of Publication:
August 2009Associated Research Groups:
Minnesota Extensible Language ToolsPublication Files:
Abstract:
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. The result is an attribute grammar specification language with a rich set of language features. Silver is implemented in itself by a Silver attribute grammar and utilizes forwarding to implement the extensions in a cost-effective manner.
Venue:
Science of Computer Programming. Special issue for LDTA 2006 and 2007. This article is the same as the proofed version available on Elsevier's web site - only the formatting differs.Bibtex:
@article{vanwyk09scp,
author = "Van Wyk, E. and Bodin, D. and Krishnan, L. and Gao, J.",
title = "Silver: an Extensible Attribute Grammar System",
journal = "Scinece of Computer Programming",
publisher = "Elsevier Science",
year = 2009,
note = "Accpeted, In Press"
}
