Reports

Specification of Interpreters and Debuggers Using an Extension of Attribute Grammars

Kaiser, Gail E.

Recent research in programming environments has focused on the generation of software tools from specifications. Several specification mechanisms have been proposed, and the most successful of these has been attribute grammars. Attribute grammars have been successfully applied to compile-time tools such as type checkers and code generators, which perform static analysis of the program, but have hitherto seemed unsuited to the description of run-time tools such as interpreters and debuggers that involve dynamic interaction with the user of the programming environment. This report describes an extension to attribute grammars that solves this problem. The extended attribute grammars are suitable for the specification of all semantics processing performed by single-user programming environments.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-196-85
Published Here
November 7, 2011