Experiences with the PSG — Programming System Generator

Abstract

The programming system generator developed at the Technical University of Darmstadt generates sophisticated interactive programming environments from formal language definitions. From a formal, entirely nonprocedural definition of the language's syntax, context conditions and denotational semantics, it produces a hybrid editor, an interpreter and a library system. The editor allows both structure editing and text editing, guaranteeing immediate recognition of syntax and semantic errors. The generator has been used to generate environments for PASCAL, MODULA-2 and the formal language definition language itself. A brief description of the generated environments and the definition language is given, and our experiences with formal language definitions are discussed from the language definer's point of view as well as from the programmer's point of view using the generated environments.