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Extending Attribute Grammars to Support Programming-in-the-Large

Micallef, Josephine; Kaiser, Gail E.

Attribute grammars add specification of static semantic properties to context-free grammars, which in turn describe the syntactic structure of program units. However, context-free grammars cannot express programming-in-the-large features common in modern programming languages, including unordered collections of units, included units and sharing of included units. We present extensions to context-free grammars, and corresponding extensions to attribute grammars, suitable for defining such features. We explain how batch and incremental attribute evaluation algorithms can be adapted to support these extensions, resulting in a uniform approach to intra-unit and inter-unit static semantic analysis and translation of multi-unit programs.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-003-93
Published Here
January 20, 2012