Decorated Attribute Grammars: Attribute Evaluation Meets Strategic Programming (Extended Technical Report)

Preprint of paper published in: Compiler Construction, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5501, 2009; doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00722-4_11 Attribute grammars are a powerful specification formalism for tree-based computation, particularly for software language processing. Various extensions have been proposed to abstract over common patterns in attribute grammar specifications. These include various forms of copy rules to support non-local dependencies, collection attributes, and expressing dependencies that are evaluated to a fixed point. Rather than implementing extensions natively in an attribute evaluator, we propose attribute decorators that describe an abstract evaluation mechanism for attributes, making it possible to provide such extensions as part of a library of decorators. Inspired by strategic programming, decorators are specified using generic traversal operators. To demonstrate their effectiveness, we describe how to employ decorators in name, type, and flow analysis