Language development by component-based tools
Thomas Lee Halverson, Teodor Rus · 1999
This dissertation describes research completed on the development of programming languages using a collection of component based tools. Each tool in this collection allows for the design, specification, and implementation of a particular facet of the language. Thus, each aspect of the language can be developed and tested independently of others. A methodology for integrating these stand alone tools into a more complex system is presented to demonstrate how these individual fragments can be composed to move toward the development of the language as a whole. The ability to choose different tools makes this environment naturally flexible because new tools can be designed, constructed, and plugged in as needed. The work being presented was done within the framework of an algebraic language processing environment and will focus on the syntactic realm of language processing. As such, the tools and examples will fall in the areas of lexical analyzers and recognizers. However, it will be shown that the same techniques are applicable to all other aspects of language development as well.