| Although the field of software engineering has produced many important advances in the design and analysis of computer programs, little work has been done to apply software engineering techniques to the design and analysis of grammars for programming languages. For the most part, researchers are still using the same antiquated tools and techniques that have been in use since the 1960's. This dissertation proposes some modern methods and tools that may be applied to the study and design of grammars for programming languages.; Three major advances are detailed in this text. First, a graphical representation is introduced that is suitable for describing grammars for programming languages. The graphical representation is shown to increase the readability and understanding of grammars, and an environment for using such representations is described. Second, some important algorithms for working with grammars are introduced, such as algorithms for extracting a subgrammar, refactoring an existing grammar, and producing a spanning set of test cases for the grammar. Finally, a markup language (GrailML) is proposed that may be used for describing grammars in a cross-platform, tool-independent manner. The markup language is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language); thus, grammars described using the markup language may be manipulated programmatically. |
