ORIENTED SYNTAX AND ASPECT-ORIENTED SEMANTICS

Providing proper modularity is one of the major challenges in software development. In the context of programming language implementation, two key factors impede the modularization process in a compiler system: First, the parser, as the core of the language implementation, usually is specified in a non-decomposable style such that it must be built as a whole regardless of the complexity of the grammar. This usually yields poor comprehensibility, reduced changeability, limited reusability, and hampers independent development of the language implementation. Second, the interconnected nature of syntax and semantic analysis of a language propels the compiler implementation to have each phase tangled together. As a result, the construction of one phase always “pollutes” a different phase, which makes a system hard to develop, maintain and extend. These two modularization complications create the intricacy in compiler design known as a “dragon ” task. With an aim to address the modularity problems and alleviate the implementation complexity in language implementations, this thesis presents a new language implementatio