An approach to generate text-based IDEs for syntax completion based on syntax specification

Abstract

The integrated development environments provide several types of functionalities. Herein, we intend to generate a syntax completion functionality from the grammar of the target language as long as the sentences of the language can be analyzed via LR parsing. We specify the syntax candidates to be completed based on the sentential forms and reductions in LR parsing. Furthermore, we implement a prototype system for computing the syntax candidates to be completed at the cursor position in the source code written in a small subset of Standard ML; the system only uses the program text up to the cursor position to ensure simplicity.