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A meta-environment for generating programming environments

Editor: W. Richards Adrion Author:

P. KlintAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 2, Issue 2

Pages 176 - 201

https://doi.org/10.1145/151257.151260

Published: 01 April 1993 Publication History

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Abstract

Over the last decade, considerable progress has been made in solving the problems of automatic generation of programming/development environments, given a formal definition of some programming or specification language. In most cases, research has focused on the functionality and efficiency of the generated environments, and, of course, these aspects will ultimately determine the acceptance of environment generators. However, only marginal attention has been paid to the development process of formal language definitions itself. Assuming that the quality of automatically generated environments will be satisfactory within a few years, the development costs of formal language definitions will then become the next limiting factor determining ultimate success and acceptance of environment generators.

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a meta-environment (a development environment for formal language definitions) based on the formalism ASF + SDF. This meta-environment is currently being implemented as part of the Centaur system and is, at least partly, obtained by applying environment generation techniques to the language definition formalism itself. A central problem is providing fully interactive editing of modular language definitions such that modifications made to the language definition during editing can be translated immediately to modifications in the programming environment generated from the original language definition. Therefore, some of the issues addressed are the treatment of formalisms with user-definable syntax and incremental program generation techniques.

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Miljak LBach Poulsen CCorvino RLaemmel RPereira JMosses P(2024)Concrete Syntax MetapatternsProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3687997.3695637(43-55)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
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Frölich Dvan Binsbergen L(2024) i C o L a +Journal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111979211:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
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van den Brand M(2023)A personal retrospective on language workbenchesSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-023-01101-922:3(847-850)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
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Index Terms

A meta-environment for generating programming environments
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
    2. Formal language definitions
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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Reviews

Reviewer: Jacques Jean Arsac

Over the last decade, automatic generators of programming environments for new programming languages have been developed. They are based on the assumption that most programming languages have a lot of structures and types in common, so the major parts of the environments are language-<__?__Pub Caret>independent, the other parts being derived from high-level formal specifications of the language. This kind of system resembles an extensible toolkit. Klint has combined two formalisms for formal language specifications, algebraic specification formalism (ASF) and syntax definition formalism (SDF). An interactive development environment has been designed and implemented for these formalisms. Thus, a language may be specified and modified within this environment, producing an environment for this language in which experiments can be performed. The paper describes ASF and SDF. Klint discusses the general architecture of the environment for them, with special attention to the problem of allowing modifications in the specifications that change what has previously been done. This problem is solved by using a modular specification, in which modules are edited separately. The author describes the various parts of the system and the implementation techniques. This paper is sound, richly documented, well presented, and easy to read. Examples illustrate the various aspects of the system. The design and implementation choices are discussed, leading to a convincing paper. Nevertheless, some doubts remain. The last section of the paper discusses some remaining problems, the most important being that “it is not yet clear whether the proposed implementation model…will scale up to industrial-size applications.” The examples given in the paper are toy examples, but this may be done only for pedagogical effect; no reason is given. This research looks like what was done in the early 1960s: a lot of new languages were developed, leading to a demand for compilers, and compiler generators were created. We discovered later that much energy had been lost in creating unnecessary languages, instead of trying to solve programming difficulties. Clearly, researchers must go on looking for more convenient languages, most of which will not reach industrial applications. Do we really need this kind of sophisticated system__?__ It could be more efficient to build specific environments for the rare languages that reach the industrial stage. This research may help us to understand what a language specification and an environment are, as the work done in the 1960s has contributed to the theory of programming languages and compiling.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 2, Issue 2

April 1993

93 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/151257

Editor:
W. Richards Adrion
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1993

Published in TOSEM Volume 2, Issue 2

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Template meta-programming for Haskell

Template meta-programming for Haskell

Compile-time meta-programming in a dynamically typed OO language

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