Incremental semantic analysis

Semantic analysis is a central part of the compilation process. The main subproblems include name analysis, type checking, and detection of static-semantic errors. In an interactive program-ming environment it is useful to perform the semantic analysis incrementally, keeping the static-semantic information up to date while the program is edited. This allows advanced browsing and editing facilities to be implemented, based on the semantic information. Furthermore, incremen-tal semantic analysis is a prerequisite for making also the rest of the compilation process incremental in order to reduce the turnaround time between editing and execution. This work is directed towards incremental semantic analysis for object-oriented program-ming languages. These languages have comparatively complex static-semantics which could not be adequately handled with earlier techniques such as attribute grammars. The main contribution of this work is a new technique for developing incremental semantic analyzers: Door Attribute Grammars. This technique extends standard attribute grammars by allowing objects and references to be specified as part of the attribution of a syntax tree. Thi