Automatic Attribute Propagation for Modular Attribute Grammars

Authors

Akim Demaille, Renaud Durlin, Nicolas Pierron, Benoît Sigoure

Type

techreport

Year

2008

Number

0801

Keywords

attribute grammar, context-free grammar, disambiguationC, C++, attribute propagator

Abstract

Attribute grammars are well suited to describe (parts of) the semantics of programming languages: hooked on the syntactic production rules, they allow to express local relations that are later bound globally by a generic evaluator. However they fall short when working on large and complex languages. First attributes that are virtually needed everywhere need to be propagated by every single production rule. Second, this constraint hinders modularity, since adding a syntactic extension might require the propagation of new attributes in the rest of the language. This paper shows how to solve these problems by introducing a technique to automatically propagate attributes by completing the set of semantic rules. We formally define the propagation constraints such that it is optimized to avoid unnecessary addition of semantic rules. Attribute grammars are thus made more maintainable, modular and easier to use.