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Tree programming languages

Maybe I just don't know the magic words to type in, but I was curious if there are any languages which are designed to specifically operate on or describe trees.

Of course, I'm aware of XSLT, but I can't help but think there's more. Unfortunately thats all it seems I can find that comes close. I would really like to know what alternate approaches there are, and as always, any good theoretical justification for the constructs would be nice too.

By Matt Estes at 2004-08-26 00:14 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 18075 reads

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Rewrite systems

The magic words are "term rewriting systems". Check out Stratego, for example. Also, take a look at "attribute grammars". A good book of string processing algorithms is Algorithsms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences by Dan Gusfield.

By Lyle Kopnicky at Thu, 2004-08-26 01:25 | login or register to post comments

TXL

You might find TXL interesting.

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2004-08-26 07:23 | login or register to post comments

Language for Bi-Directional Tree Transformations

I found this intriguing.

By Manu Simoni at Thu, 2004-08-26 09:08 | login or register to post comments

there's some interesting theo

there's some interesting theory from bird, iirc, on consuming and generating trees (maybe this, although i got a (free) copy from the web somewhere?). i was tidying my desk at home a few days ago and found a paper of his i'd only ever got half way through. i can't seem to find it via google, though. sorry.

there's a whole pile of work related to abstract syntax trees - see here or what lyle said.

By andrew cooke at Thu, 2004-08-26 17:36 | login or register to post comments

graphical concurrent tree rewriting:

http://strlen.com/aardappel/
:)

By Wouter at Fri, 2004-08-27 01:53 | login or register to post comments

The usual suspects

For what it's worth, lists are 1-ary trees. That makes most list based languages essentially tree based languages. e.g. Lisp, Scheme. (I realize the logic went from specialisation to general case, but I think the example cases prove correct).

By Ewan at Fri, 2004-09-10 22:37 | login or register to post comments

1-ary or k-ary?

Couldn't a list of lists be considered a k-ary tree?

By cdiggins at Mon, 2004-09-13 04:17 | login or register to post comments

One branch per node

The arity of a tree is the number of branches per node. There is only one branch per node with a list.

By Marc Hamann at Mon, 2004-09-13 12:23 | login or register to post comments