Incremental Evaluation for Attribute Grammars
with Application to Syntax-directed Editors
Alan Demers, Thomas Reps, and Tim Teitelbaum
A syntax-directed editor is a tool for structured program development.
Such an editor can enforce syntactic correctness incrementally by
restricting editing operations to legitimate modifications of the
program's context-free derivation tree. However, not all language
features can be described by the context-free formalism. To build
editors that enforce non-context-free correctness, a more powerful
specification technique is needed. In this paper we discuss the
advantages of attribute grammars as a specification technique for a
syntax-directed editing system. We also present an efficient
algorithm for incrementally evaluating attributes as a program tree is
derived.
Cornell University