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Circular attribute grammars with remote attribute references and their evaluators

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Abstract

Attribute grammars (AGs) are a suitable formalism for the development of language processing systems. However, for languages including unrestricted labeled jumps, such as “goto” in C, the optimizers in compilers are difficult to write in AGs. This is due to two problems that few previous researchers could deal with simultaneously, i.e., references of attribute values on distant nodes and circularity in attribute dependency. This paper proposescircular remote attribute grammars (CRAGs), an extension of AGs that allows (1) direct relations between two distant attribute instances through pointers referring to other nodes in the derivation tree, and (2) circular dependencies, under certain conditions including those that arise from remote references. This extension gives AG programmers a natural means of describing language processors and programming environments for languages that include any type of jump structure. We also show a method of constructing an efficient evaluator for CRAGs called amostly static evaluator. The performance of the proposed evaluator has been measured and compared with dynamic and static evaluators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, 108-8639, Tokyo, Japan

    Akira Sasaki

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, 152-8552, Tokyo, Japan

    Masataka Sassa

Authors
  1. Akira Sasaki
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  2. Masataka Sassa
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Akira Sasaki: He is a research fellow of the Advanced Clinical Research Center in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo. He received his BSc and MSc from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1994 and 1996, respectively. His research interests include programming languages, programming language processors and programming environments, especially compiler compilers, attribute grammars and systematic debugging. He is a member of the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology.

Masataka Sassa, D.Sc.: He is Professor of Computer Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He received his BSc, MSc and DSc from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1970, 1972 and 1978, respectively. His research interests include programming languages, programming language processors and programming environments, currently he is focusing on compiler optimization, compiler infrastructure, attribute grammars and systematic debugging. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, Japan Society for Software Science and Technology, and Information Processing Society of Japan.

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Sasaki, A., Sassa, M. Circular attribute grammars with remote attribute references and their evaluators. New Gener Comput 22, 37–60 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037280

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037280

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