Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!ruuinf!harald
From: harald@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Harald Vogt)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Synthesizer Generator for SYSV HP UNIX
Keywords: Synthesizer Generator
Message-ID: <1375@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>
Date: 9 Jun 89 13:02:01 GMT
References: <1372@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl> <1748@scubed.UUCP>
Organization: Univ of Utrecht, Dept of CS
Lines: 25

In article <1748@scubed.UUCP>, warner@s3dawn.ARPA (Ken Warner) writes:
> What is a Sythesizer Generator?

The Synthesizer Generator is a program that enables
language-based environments for different languages to be
created easily from formal specifications of the syntax, the
display format, and the semantics.

Knowledge of programming language's grammar allows language
based editors to enforce syntactic correctness at all times
during development by restricting editing operations to
legitimate modifications of the program's context free tree;
however, not all language constraints can be described by the
context-free formalism. Attribute grammars permit
context-dependent language features to be expressed in a
modular, declarative fashion and thus are a good basis for
specifying language based editors. Such editors represent
programs as attributed trees, which are modified by operations
such as subtree pruning and grafting. Incremental analysis is
performed by updating attribute values after every
modification.

For more details see: The Synthesizer Generator: A System 
for Constructing Language-based Editors, T.W. Reps and T. Teitelbaum, 
published by Springer-Verlag.