Maintained and constructor attributes

Abstract

The potential of the language specific editor as a software engineering tool has attracted much attention in the last few years [Henderson, 84]. This form of an editor offers software engineers the possibility of performing interactive analysis during software production. As a consequence of this possibility, editor generators have become a topic of current research [Reps and Teitelbaum, 84]. In this paper, we describe a general scheme that permits an editor generator to produce a context sensitive, language based editor. The goals of the scheme are to generate editors which can perform interactive type checking, data flow analysis, separate compilation, and update the software project database. The scheme supplements existing attribute grammar techniques with a notion of state provided by maintained and constructor attributes. The method extends the schemes of [Reps et al., 83] and [Fischer and Johnson, 82] by introducing external data structures which support the communication of programming information to the global programming environment.