Automatic generation of efficient evaluators for attribute grammars

Abstract

The translation process may be divided into a syntactic phase and a semantic phase. Context-free grammars can be used to describe the set of syntactically correct source texts in a formal yet intuitively appealing way, and many techniques are now known for automatically constructing parsers from given CF grammars. Knuth's attribute grammars offer the prospect of similarly automating the implementation of the semantic phase.