MUIR - a language development environment

Abstract

The concept of a language development environment is introduced and motivated. The key facilities and characteristics of such an environment is described, and a concrete system called Muir is studied. In a language development environment the language definition formalism is central. We introduce a context free grammar definition formalism that emphasizes the hierarchical classification of syntactic domains, and we argue that syntax-directed editing is useful especially when making experiments with new languages. Finally, we discuss how to keep documents consistent with a grammar that is under development.