First Class Syntax, Semantics, and Their Composition

Embedding attribute grammars and their extensions using functional zippers

“…Regarding other notable embeddings of AGs in functional languages [7,8,10], they do not offer the modern AG extensions that we provide, with the exception of [10] that uses macros to allow the definition of higher-order attributes. Also, these embeddings are not based on zippers, they rely on laziness and use extensible records [7] or heterogeneous collections [8,10]. The use of heterogeneous lists in the second of these approaches replaces the use in the first approach of extensible records, which are no longer supported by the main Haskell compilers.…”

“…Our embedding does not require the programmer to explicitly combine different attributes nor does it require combination of the semantic rules for a particular node in the syntax tree, as is the case in the work of Viera et al [8,10]. In this sense, our implementation requires less effort from the programmer.…”

“…Firstly, attribute grammars are embedded in regular programming languages with AG fragments as first-class values in the language: they can be analyzed, reused and compiled independently [7][8][9][10][11]. First class AGs provide: i) A full component-based approach to AGs where a language is specified/implemented as a set of reusable off-the-shelf components; ii) Semantic-based modularity, while some traditional AG systems use a (restricted) syntactic approach to modularity.…”

Introduction—the LDTA tool challenge

“…The tools clearly differ in expressiveness and underlying methodology. The tools that participated are, in alphabetic order, CoCoCo [8], JastAdd [9,10], Kiama [11], OCaml [12], Rascal [13,14], Silver [15,16], and Simpl [17]. The underlying technologies are based attribute grammars, term rewriting, functional programming, etc.…”

Zipper-Based Attribute Grammars and Their Extensions

“…Regarding other notable embeddings of AGs in functional languages [28][29][30], they do not offer the modern AG extensions that we provided, with the exception of [30] that uses macros to allow the definition of higher-order attributes. Also, these embeddings are not based on zippers, rely on laziness and use extensible records [28] or heterogeneous collections [29,30]. The use of heterogeneous lists in the second of these approaches replaces the use in the first approach of extensible records, which are no longer supported by the main Haskell compilers.…”