Circular higher-order reference attribute grammars

Abstract

Reference attribute grammars (RAGs) provide a practical declarative means to implement programming language compilers and other tools. RAGs have previously been extended to support both circular attributes and context-dependent declarative rewrites of the abstract syntax tree. In this previous work, dependencies between circular attributes and rewrites are not considered. In this paper, we investigate how these extensions can interact, and still be well defined. We introduce a generalized evaluation algorithm that can handle grammars where circular attributes and rewrites are interdependent. To this end, we introduce circular higher-order attributes, and show how RAG rewrites are a special form of such attributes. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.