Incremental Context-Sensitive Evaluation in Context

Although techniques for implementing or generating incremental semantic evaluators have been explored and refined for more than two decades, several pragmatic concerns still impede the use of such techniques in practical development environments. This report not only addresses some of these concerns, but furthermore demonstrates the need to consider the problem of incremental semantic evaluation in context. The practical concerns addressed here stem from both user interaction and architectural requirements. In particular an innovative preemptive evaluation scheme is presented which helps to reduce delays associated with semantic evaluation over a sequence of edits. Furthermore, a technique for assigning attributes to syntactically erroneous material (the introduction of which is inevitable in a syntax recognition editor) is described, as well as a novel approach to handling "long-distance" semantic effects using fine-grained incremental evaluation of relations