Generation of Formatters for Context-free Languages (1995)
| Venue: | ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology |
| Citations: | 64 - 19 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Brand95generationof,
author = {M.G.J. van den Brand and E. Visser},
title = {Generation of Formatters for Context-free Languages},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology},
year = {1995},
volume = {5},
pages = {1--41}
}
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Abstract
Good documentation is important for the production of reusable and maintainable software. For the production of accurate documentation it is necessary that the original program text is not copied manually to obtain a typeset version. Aside of being tedious, this will invariably lead to errors. Tools that support the production of legible and accurate documentation are essential in software engineering. The production of such tools is a software engineering challenge in itself. We present an algebraic approach to the generation of tools that produce typographically effective presentations of computer programs. A specification of a formatter is generated from the context-free grammar of a programming language. These genererated formatters translate abstract syntax trees of programs into box expressions. These box expressions are translated by language independent interpreters of the box language into ascii or T E X. The formatting rules that are generated can easily be fine tuned in orde...
