An environment for developing context-free grammars

We have recently published the following technical report:


Supporting the Development of Grammar Descriptions for Multiple
Applications
Conleth S. O'Connell Jr.
OSU-CISRC-7/90-TR20, July, 1990, 39 pp.


If you would like a copy, you may send the request via email to


strawser@cis.ohio-state.edu


Please include your postal mailing address.




                                                                ABSTRACT


In computer science, context-free grammars are used extensively to describe
data sets such as manuscript types and programming languages. The data, or
members, contained in a particular set represent instances of the grammar
describing that set, for example, documents and programs.


Determining the elements comprising instances is the task of content
investigation. Imposing structure on these elements is the task of grammar
development. Creating, editing, and manipulating instances of a grammar is
the task of grammar instantiation. Grammar instantiation has received much
attention with software systems such as programming environments and
compound-document environments. Content investigation and grammar
development have only recently been recognized as recurring complex tasks.
They have received little attention because of their newly emerging
significance. This work focuses on grammar development.


Grammar development produces a grammar description in a particular notation
that contains two types of information: a formal, context-free grammar and
auxiliary information. Auxiliary information describes the application of
the grammar description. For example, a grammar may describe the manuscript
type ``article,'' but the auxiliary information may describe how to format
the instances for layout, how to analyze the sentence structure, or how to
exchange documents of that type.


The separation of the general, context-free grammar from the
application-specific, auxiliary information provides the power and
flexibility to generalize problem classes associated with grammar
development. The formalisms of context-free grammars motivate two such
problem classes: syntactic properties and semantic properties. The analysis
of the development of large grammars motivates two other problem classes:
reusable grammars and multiple notations.


A review of existing software systems reveals that a new, general-purpose,
support environment was required for developing grammar descriptions. A
prototype environment for developing grammar descriptions, DeveGram, has been
designed and implemented. DeveGram controls and manages the four problem
classes by capturing any context-free grammar, providing mechanisms for
determining properties about a grammar, capturing auxiliary information, and
generating automatically grammar descriptions in a testbed of different
notations. DeveGram produces grammar descriptions for a testbed of software
systems differing in syntax and purpose. The testbed presently consists of
Yacc, SGML, MDL, MANDEN, and BNF.


Dr. Conleth S. O'Connell Jr. Department of Computer and Information Science
                                                                              The Ohio State University
cso@cis.ohio-state.edu 2036 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH USA 43210-1277
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