Assessing attribute grammars’ quality: Metrics and a tool

Abstract

The definition of metrics and their evaluation process is an activity intrinsic to each engineering branch and it has to do with the need to reason quantitatively about the quality of the developed products. Years ago software engineers working on the field of formal languages and grammars came out with the idea of measuring grammars. However no much progress was done in this trend; there is a clear lack for tools to automatize the computation of some grammar metrics grammars. In this paper we will introduce a tool, GQE, aimed at evaluating a new set of simple metrics for attribute grammars (AG) in order to help on the assessment of AGs quality.