Friendly Incremental Prototyping
M. V. Ferro & M.A.A. Pardo (Coruna)
(Available as P9504-8.ps.gz)
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Abstract
A development environment for interactive systems devoted to generate
formal languages is described. Our system is organized around three
cooperative modules. The first is a generator of general context-free
parsers, following different parsing schemes among several
available. The second is a generic incremental parsing facility that
can be used to make the overall parsing process efficient in the
context of program development. The third is an extensible user
graphical interface that provides a complete set of customization and
trace facilities for the system.
The final tool has been baptized Ice, after Incremental Context-Free
Environment. All components in Ice show a reasonable grade of
efficiency both, in space and time. In an empirical comparison, it
appears to be superior to other general context-free parsing
environments and is comparable to the classic deterministic ones, when
the context is not ambiguous. The cooperative architecture allows the
modification of the environment, by adding or redesigning modules,
with low impact on other components.