The Poe language-based editor project

Abstract

Editor Allan Poe (Pascal Oriented Editor) is a full-screen language-based editor (LBE) that knows the syntactic and semantic rules of Pascal. It is the first step in development of a comprehensive Pascal program development environment. Poe's design began in 1979; version 1 is currently operational on Vax 11s under Berkeley Unix and on HP 9800-series personal workstations. Poe is written in Pascal, and is designed to be readily transportable to new machines. An editor-generating system called Poegen is operational, and much of the language-specific character of Poe is table-driven and retargetable.

Efficient evaluation of circular attribute grammars

“…The systems generated are based on the incremental attribute evaluation algorithms presented in [33], [34], and [37] with the exception that whenever the attribute grammar is an ordered attribute grammar [23] the more efficient algorithm of [44] is selected. Other systems utilizing incremental attribute evaluation techniques include the Pascal Oriented Editor (POE) [14], the Software Automation, Generation, and Administration (SAGA) project [6], the Incremental Circuit Editor (ICE) system [20], and the Program System Generator (PSG) system [5].…”

“…Attributed translation schemes have proved useful in the specification of compilers used by compiler generation systems (e.g., see [12] and [24]) and also as a basis for the operations required by incremental languagebased editors (e.g., [5], [6], [14], and [41]). Attribute grammars have become an important component in the theory of programming language implementation IL 421.…”

Grammar-based program transformation

“…Many tools have incorporated structural characteristics into the editing process [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Grammar-based editing, in order to facilitate identification and modification of source ctde patterns, goes the next step in abstraction, beyond a tree-baed abstraction of text to a grammar-based abstraction of trees.…”

“…Structured editors (also known as syntax-directed editors or limguage sensitive editors [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]) provide the capabilig to edit in terms of program structure. However, structured editors tend to emphasize initial creation of source code over masfication of existing source code.…”

Technological advances in software engineering

“…The development started out with environments that provided useful tools to support various programming tasks. The current state of the art of generating programming environments is able to handle the syntactic issues of structure, formatting and representation, and also the semantic issues of static consistency, runtime support and dynamic modifications [Re82, Ka85].…”