Object-oriented visual language grammar and its parsing algorithm

Abstract

Due to the deficiencies in their ability to define graphical objects, most existing visual language grammars are not easily extended to define a new language. In this paper we propose a formal specification method, the Object-Oriented Visual Language Grammar that allows the language designer to include graphical objects easily at the language specification level. It is a new formalism based on attributed multiset rewriting and the object-oriented paradigm. We also present a parsing algorithm that uses an And-Or-Waiting Graph to formulate dependencies between classes for instantiating objects. Finally, we investigate the theoretical complexity of our parsing algorithm.