Bounded seas

Abstract

Imprecise manipulation of source code (semi-parsing) is useful for tasks such as robust parsing, error recovery, lexical analysis, and rapid development of parsers for data extraction. An island grammar precisely defines only a subset of a language syntax (islands), while the rest of the syntax (water) is defined imprecisely. Usually water is defined as the negation of islands. Albeit simple, such a definition of water is naive and impedes composition of islands. When developing an island grammar, sooner or later a language engineer has to create water tailored to each individual island. Such an approach is fragile, because water can change with any change of a grammar. It is time-consuming, because water is defined manually by an engineer and not automatically. Finally, an island surrounded by water cannot be reused because water has to be defined for every grammar individually. In this paper we propose a new technique of island parsing-bounded seas. Bounded seas are composable, robust, reusable and easy to use because island-specific water is created automatically. Our work focuses on applications of island parsing to data extraction from source code. We have integrated bounded seas into a parser combinator framework as a demonstration of their composability and reusability.

Customizing host IDE for non-programming users of pure embedded DSLs: A case study

“…The Java group consisted of 16 We assigned the participants into groups according to their attendance to the lessons which we could access. During two lessons, the students were assigned to the Java group, students attending the other two lessons to the Ruby group.…”

“…Automation was used to check whether the participant's solution was compilable and runnable (i.e., it did not contain any syntactic or domain-specific errors). We manually examined the tests to decide whether they exactly corresponded to the specification, or were comparably complex to the task specification 16 . Finally, videos were skimmed to determine completion times and to observe subjects' habits during working with the DSL.…”

“…This changes the language to heterogeneous with the implementation costs lower than in other approaches (like for example Metaborg [46]). Kurš et al [16] use island grammars for creating composable and reusable islands called bounded seas that compute scope for water parsing. We aim for the same result as these approaches, but we keep the language homogeneously embedded.…”

“…Heterogeneous embedding utilizes language composition on the level of tools -in heterogeneous embedding, the embedded language and the host language are not processed by the same compiler. An example of heterogeneous embedding are island grammars [16]. "Islands" are grammars embedded in the host language grammar, which is called "water".…”

Recording concerns in source code using annotations

“…Annotations are a program-level declarative marking technique [1]. They are usually used as an implementation technique for pure embedding [25], since they can be considered an alternative to embedded domain-specific language (DSL) implementation techniques [26,27,28]. Today, another one of the most common applications of annotations is configuration.…”