Software engineering has to reconcile modularity with e- ciency. One way to grapple with this dilemma is to automatically transform a modular-specied program into an ecient-implementable one.

A definition of the semantics of attribute grammars is given, using the lambda calculus. We show how this semantics allows us to prove results about attribute grammars in a calculational style. In particular, we give a new proof of Chirica and Martin's result [6], that the attribute values can be computed by a structural recursion over the tree. We also derive a new definedness test, which encompasses the traditional closure and circularity tests. The test is derived by abstract interpretation.

Programming languages and programming tasks are rarely a perfect fit: often a program could be much clarified by using a number of tailored language features...