A Component-Based Formal Language Workbench

Abstract

The CBS framework supports component-based specification of programming languages. It aims to significantly reduce the effort of formal language specification, and thereby encourage language developers to exploit formal semantics more widely. CBS provides an extensive library of reusable language specification components, facilitating co-evolution of languages and their specifications.After introducing CBS and its formal definition, this short paper reports work in progress on generating an IDE for CBS from the definition. It also considers the possibility of supporting componentbased language specification in other formal language workbenches.

Fundamental Constructs in Programming Languages

“…Clearly, tool support for checking is essential. A workbench for specifying translations of languages to funcons has been developed [21]. Tools for evaluating funcon terms [5] allow us to check whether they have the expected behaviour.…”

“…It is based on the Spoofax language workbench [12], and implemented using the declarative domain-specific meta-languages Sdf3, NaBL2, and Stratego. See [21] for further details. The tools for evaluating funcon terms [5] are implemented in Haskell, and can be called directly from the workbench.…”

“…The reader is assumed to be interested in programming languages, and familiar with their main concepts. The research on which this paper is based has been published elsewhere [4,7,8,19,21,22,23]. The main aims here are to motivate the general idea of funcons, and illustrate how they can be used to specify the behaviour of programming language constructs.…”

Fundamental Constructs in Programming Languages

“…Clearly, tool support for checking is essential. A workbench for specifying translations of languages to funcons is being developed [18]. Tools for executing funcon terms [3] allow us to check whether they have the expected behaviour.…”

“…The reader is assumed to be interested in programming languages, and familiar with their main concepts. The research on which this paper is based has been published elsewhere [2,5,6,16,18,19,20]. The main aims here are to motivate the general idea of funcons, and illustrate how they can be used to explain the behaviour of programming language constructs:…”