A NEW APPROACH TO LANGUAGE EXTENSION:X ARCHITECTURE
Hu Wei · Chinese Journal of Computers · 1999
The language mechanism is the main vehicle to provide abstraction, but it is hard to implement a language extension. This paper Introduces the extensible compiler architecture which Is called X architecture, to speed up the development of language features which condensed the domain specific abstractions and skills. The core of the system is an extensible language called X language, it lets the programs of that language access multi-views of program such as AST, class graph etc, and extend the language. The domain abstraction vendor can extend the language incrementally to generate domain specific compiler. This paper also demonstrates how to add a new language facility, Meta-enumeration, smoothly to the X architecture and keep the same efficiency as hand-crafted compiler.