Development, assessment, and reengineering of language descriptions

Abstract

Discusses tools that aid in the development, assessment and reengineering of language descriptions (i.e. syntactic descriptions of a language). We develop assessment tools that give an indication as to what is wrong with an existing language description, and give hints towards its correction. From a correct and complete language description, it is possible to generate a parser, a manual and online documentation. The parser is geared towards reengineering purposes, but is also used to parse the examples that are contained in the documentation. The reengineered language description is a basic ingredient for a reengineering factory that can manipulate this language. The described tool support can also be used to develop a language standard without syntax errors in the language description and its code examples.