Silver: an Extensible Attribute Grammar System

Date of Publication: 
August 2009
Authors: 
Eric Van Wyk
Authors: 
Derek Bodin
Authors: 
Jimin Gao
Associated Research Groups: 
Minnesota Extensible Language Tools
Publication 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"
}