Extending Spoofax with a REPL

The Spoofax Language Workbench supports the definition of all aspects of textual languages using high-level, declarative meta-languages. From a language definition using these meta-languages, Spoofax generates full-featured Eclipse and IntelliJ editor plugins, as well as a command-line interface.” A feature that Spoofax is lacking is a Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL). A REPL is an interactive programming environment that takes single expressions, evaluates them and prints the result(s). REPLs facilitate exploratory programming and debugging and are therefore a nice addition to Spoofax. Two contributions have been made. First, a functioning REPL has been created, comparable in features to those of popular programming languages such as Python and Haskell.Second, changes have been contributed to Spoofax that have been integrated into the main repository. To successfully complete the project, extensive knowledge needed to be gained of the conceptual ideas behind programming language implementations, and of the Spoofax API implementing these concepts. Despite having faced significant challenges during the start of the project, the most important goals as set forth in the problem description have been achieved. Therefore, the project team is still satisfied with the end result: while not all requested features have been implemented, it has been shown that it is possible to create a functioning REPL for any language defined in Spoofax, requiring only additional configuration to a language definition.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer ScienceSoftware Technolog