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A Functional Semantics of Attribute Grammars

A Functional Semantics of Attribute Grammars

A definition of the semantics of attribute grammars is given,
using the lambda calculus. We show how this semantics allows us to prove
results about attribute grammars in a calculational style.

I didn't encounter attribute grammars since school, so it was refreshing to see them in this light.
I have to check yet, whether "abstract interpretation" used in this paper is related to the one from Oleg's paper.

By Andris Birkmanis at 2004-07-27 15:57 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 5500 reads

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Use futures...?

In practice, for such problems I would prefer to use some language with futures instead of fix points :-)

Need to investigate, how related they are... I can see some similarity between fix point and unification.

By Andris Birkmanis at Tue, 2004-07-27 16:25 | login or register to post comments

I said it hurts :-)

An earlier paper by one of the authors:
First-class Attribute Grammars

There exists a well-known encoding of attribute grammars into programming languages that have lazy evaluation. This encoding has been dismissed by others on the following grounds:
• Lazy evaluation is inherently inefficient, and therefore an attribute evaluator based on it must
be inefficient.
• The resulting programs are highly convoluted and much less modular than standard attribute
grammars.

The first objection has been refuted...
...The second objection remains valid, however...

Scary? Well, I cheated a bit, the above is the context of the paper, not its achievement.
Now the true stuff:


It is the compositional semantics (of well known structuring mechanisms) that is the contribution of this paper. The fact that the semantics is an executable prototype is a pleasant side effect of expressing ourselves in a lazy functional programming
language.

and


We believe that it is beneficial
to give a semantics to aspects, so that they are first-class values...

It's interesting to explore an evolution of a paper in time, seeing how the ideas change. For example, the later paper dropped notion of aspects. Is AOP really popular?

By Andris Birkmanis at Tue, 2004-07-27 17:51 | login or register to post comments