Computing repair alternatives for malformed programs using constraint attribute grammars

Abstract

Attribute grammars decorate the nodes of a program's parse tree with attributes whose values are defined by equations encoding the (static) semantics of a programming language. We show how replacing the equations of an attribute grammar with equivalent constraints that can be solved by a constraint solver allows us to compute repairs of a malformed program solely from a specification that was originally designed for checking its well-formedness. We present two repair modes --- shallow and deep fixing --- whose computed repair alternatives are guaranteed to repair every error on which they are invoked. While shallow fixing may introduce new errors, deep fixing never does; to make it tractable, we implement it using neighborhood search. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by implementing it on top of ExtendJ, an attribute grammar based Java compiler, and by applying it to an example from the Java EE context, detecting and fixing well-formedness errors (both real and injected) in a body of 14 open-source subject programs.