Mechanical generation of concrete syntax rules for the Schütz semantic editor

Abstract

Schütz is a programmer's editor designed by Dr. Rodney Bates. Through its language definition language, users may adapt Schütz to any programming language. Describing a programming language in the language definition language involves writing largely parallel rule sets in three different syntaxes—the concrete syntax, the abstract syntax, and the format syntax. In this thesis, we present a method for mechanically generating the concrete syntax rule set, given the rule sets of the other two syntaxes; we also prove that the concrete syntax rule sets thus generated are correct and unambiguous, given the same traits in the rule sets of the other two syntaxes.