Building semantic editors using JastAdd

Abstract

A semantic editor, providing services like completion and code browsing, can help users to quickly develop high-quality source code. However, a lot of languages still lack semantic editor support due to the difficulty and costs of development. Tool generation and reuse can greatly alleviate this development task. Specifically, tool generation from a formal specification, such as reference attribute grammars (RAGs), can increase development speed by reusing existing specifications. In this tool demonstration we demonstrate how semantic editors can be built with the aid of JastAdd, a meta-compilation tool based on RAGs. We demonstrate two editors built this way. One for a small object-oriented language, PicoJava, and one for the JastAdd specification language itself.