A grammar-based approach to automatic generation of user-interface dialogues
Michael Lee Scott, Sue-Ken Yap · 1988
An effective user interface requires a dialogue layer that can handle multiple threads of interaction simultaneously. We propose a notation for specifying dialogues based on context-free attributed grammars with two extensions: fork operators for specifying sub-dialogues and context attributes for dispatching tokens. The notation is useful both as a means of communicating the behavior of the dialogue layer to designers and as input to a dialogue compiler that generates program code. In this paper we explain the motivation for our work and provide practical examples of the use of fork and context. In addition, we outline algorithms for parsing and for generating parser tables.