Generating Editors for Embedded Languages

The paper Generating Editors for Embedded Languages. Integrating SGLR into IMP by Lennart Kats, Karl Trygve Kalleberg, and Eelco Visser has been accepted by Language Descriptions, Tools, and Applications (LDTA'08) to be held in Budapest, Hungary in April 2008 as part of ETAPS'08. The paper reports on the succesful integration of the SGLR parser in the IMP framework for building language-specific Eclipse plugins. Through this integration the capability of SDF/SGLR to support language embedings is extended to the IDE. This project is a first step towards generation of full fledged IDEs from SDF/Stratego language definitions. From the abstract:

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) increase productivity by providing a rich user interface and rapid feedback for a specific language. Creating an editor for a specific language is not a trivial undertaking, and is a cumbersome task even when working with an extensible framework such as Eclipse. The IMP framework relieves the IDE developer from a significant portion of the required work by providing various abstractions for this. For embedded % domain-specific languages, such as embedded regular expressions, SQL queries, or code generation templates, its LALR parser generator falls short, however. Scannerless parsing with SGLR enables concise, modular definition of such languages. In this paper, we present an integration of SGLR into IMP, demonstrating that a scannerless parser can be successfully integrated into an IDE. Given an SDF syntax definition, the \textsc{sdf2imp} tool automatically generates an editor plugin based on the IMP API, complete with syntax checking, syntax highlighting, outline view, and code folding. Using declarative domain-specific languages, these services can be customized, and using the IMP metatooling framework it can be extended with other features.