Declarative specification of template-based textual editors
Tobi Vollebregt, Lennart C.L. Kats, Eelco Visser · 2012
Syntax discoverability has been a crucial advantage of structure editors for new users of a language. Despite this advantage, structure editors have not been widely adopted. Based on immediate parsing and analyses, modern textual code editors are also increasingly syntax-aware: structure and textual editors are converging into a new editing paradigm that combines text and templates. Current text-based language workbenches require redundant specification of the ingredients for a template-based editor, which is detrimental to the quality of syntactic completion, as consistency and completeness of the definition cannot be guaranteed.