Silver: An extensible attribute grammar system

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.

Concern-oriented language development (COLD): Fostering reuse in language engineering

“…From attribute grammars [22] to Parsing Expression Grammars [23] and scannerless parsing [24] , the literature is rich in extension and modularization techniques for grammars. The same can naturally be said of the metamodeling world, where the problem of composing language constituents often boils down to the problem of (meta-)model composition [25] .…”

An Introductory Tutorial on JastAdd Attribute Grammars

“…In addition to JastAdd, there are several other current systems that support reference attributes, including Silver [WBGK10], Kiama [SKV09], and ASTER [KSV09]. While these systems use quite different syntax than JastAdd, and support a partly different set of features, this tutorial can hopefully be of value also to users of these systems: the main ideas for how to think declaratively about reference attributes, and how to solve problems using them, still apply.…”

Decorated Attribute Grammars: Attribute Evaluation Meets Strategic Programming

“…Two systems that do aim at different degrees of extensibility are Silver [29] and first-class attribute grammars [24].…”

“…Silver supports extension with automatic copy rules as well as more advanced features such as collection attributes in a relatively accessible manner [29]. Implemented in itself, the Silver language can be used to modularly implement such extensions.…”