Attribute propagation by message passing
Alan J. Demers, Anne Rogers, Frank Kenneth Zadeck · 1985
The goal of our work is to use the paradigms of syntax-directed editing to perform very sophisticated semantic checking, for example, to check flow-sensitive properties such as whether a variable is necessarily defined before it is used. Semantic checking of this power is much more important than syntax checking because it relieves the programmer of the need to keep track of numerous details as the program grows in complexity.