Attribute Grammar Extensions Higher Order Attribute Grammars And Views

In my Master's thesis I rediscovered the concept of Composable Attribute Grammars (Farrow et al). In this setting, some functionality of a compiler is written not in the AST of the language to be compiled, but in some simpler AST that has fewer constructs and nodes. Then, the compiler writer has to provide a mapping between these two ASTs to apply this functionality in the compiler.

The advantage of this approach is that by providing different mappings, we can reuse the abstracted functionality in compilers for different languages/ASTs.

In my view, the main contribution of my thesis is a new compilation technique of Attributed Views (or Composable Attribute Grammars) into a lazy evaluator. This new technique enables separate compilation of Attribute Grammars without the need for the Separability restriction that Farrow et al impose on Composable attribute grammars.

Software

A proof of concept prototype for Attribute Grammar Views exists. You can download it via CVS:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.cs.uu.nl:/data/cvs-rep login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.cs.uu.nl:/data/cvs-rep \
      checkout -r ref-views-impl uust

The first command requires a password to login, you may ignore this prompt and press enter. The next command checks out the uust repository, including the sources of the UUAG system. The tag name is a development branch where the AG Views prototype resides. You will need the Glasgow Haskell Compiler to build the prototype.

The following commands from the root directory of the package build the repository tools and libraries:

./configure
make
make install

You may need special privileges for the last command. However, it is not necessary to install the package to test the tools. They can be found in directory build/bin.

The AG Views prototype is in directory tools/ag/dev. To build it type the command make devel in that directory. Read the file AGviews-README for an explanation on how to run the examples presented in this thesis.

This prototype for Higher order attribute grammars may be checked out using the tag ref-hoag-impl.

-- AlexeyRodriguez - 03 Aug 2006