[PDF][PDF] Abstract syntax from concrete syntax

DS Wile - Proceedings of the 19th international conference on …, 1997 - dl.acm.org
DS Wile
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering, 1997dl.acm.org
ABSTRACT Modem Software Engineering practice advocates the development of domain-
specific specification languages to characterize formally the idioms of discourse and jargon
of specific problem domains. With poorly-understood domains it is best to construct an
abstract syntax to characterize the domain concepts and abstractions before developing a
concrete syntax. Often, however, a good concrete syntax exists a priori: sometimes in
sophisticated formal languages characterizing(often mathematical) domains but more often …
Abstract
Modem Software Engineering practice advocates the development of domain-specific specification languages to characterize formally the idioms of discourse and jargon of specific problem domains. With poorly-understood domains it is best to construct an abstract syntax to characterize the domain concepts and abstractions before developing a concrete syntax. Often, however, a good concrete syntax exists a priori: sometimes in sophisticated formal languages characterizing(often mathematical) domains but more often in miniature, legacy-code languages, sorely in need of reverse engineering. In such cases, it is necessary to derive an appropriate abstract syntax-or its first cousin, an object-oriented model-from the concrete syntax. This report describes a transformation process that produces a good abstract representation from a low-level concrete syntax specification.
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