News February 22, 2005 Update of Publications and Slovenian URL's. December 22, 2004 Update of Project Subpages. December 21, 2004 Marjan joins the group. Be welcome! December 21, 2004 Update of Research.Voda project Homepage (links for docs). December 17, 2004 Created new web for the Research.Voda project.

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Grammar-based systems

Description

Practitioners face many difficulties solving problems by computer. There is a big gap between the problem statement and programming code. Several approaches have been proposed during the past years. The main idea is to define a general way, not very complex, to solve particular problems. In a previous work, we suggested to use attribute grammars as one of such approach to problem development and we call it Grammatical Approach to Problem Solving. We know that this kind of problem solving is not so common for developers and what is more, they are not so experienced. Therefore, we should provide some guidelines to help practitioners deciding if a problem is suitable for that development method.

This approach is only one of many examples using grammars as a tool for solving problems, as we have shown in another research papers.

In this work, we analyze some examples of Grammar-based Systems in order to abstract some patterns that describe those problems. Based on that, we propose a decision method to identify cases where grammar approach can be useful. We will use some real size case studies to illustrate the applicability of the decision process. Additionally, we suggest the methodology 'programming patterns', to apply grammar concepts to the elected class of problems.

... for more details

Financial Support

• Bilateral Project supported by GRICES (Portuguese Gov.) and by Slovenian Government during 2004-2006.
• Project No. BI-PT/04-06-008

Partners

• Departamento de Informática - UMinho
• Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Bragança - IPB
• Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Informatics - UMaribor

Research Team

• Pedro Rangel Henriques
• Maria Joao Varanda
• Eva Oliveira

• Marjan Mernik
• Tomaz Kosar
• Damijan Rebernak

Previous Work

Published Papers

• Automatic Generation of Language-based Tools (LDTA Workshop 2002)
• Gramatical Approach to Problem Solving (ITI Conference 2003)

Technical Reports

• Object-Oriented Attribute Grammar based Grammatical Approach to Problem Specification (Technical report)

Undergoing Work

Visits

• 13-19 December 2004, Universidade do Minho, Braga. (Travel Report)
• 18-23 February 2005, Univerza v Mariboru, Maribor. (Travel Report)
• 4-8 October 2005, Univerza v Mariboru, Maribor. (Travel Report)
• 17-21 June 2006, ITI'06 Conference, Croatia. (Travel Report)

Deliverables

• Grammar-Based Systems: Definition and Examples (Informatica journal - November 2004)
• Software Development with Grammatical Approach (Informatica journal - December 2004)
• Automatic Generation of Language-based Tools using LISA system (IEE Software Journal, vol 152, pp. 54-70, Issue 2 April 2005 (special issue on Language Definitions and Tool Generation))
• AspectLISA: an aspect-oriented compiler construction system based on attribute grammars (LDTA Workshop 2006)
• Specifying Languages using Aspect-oriented Approach: AspectLISA (ITI Conference 2006)

Bibliography (bibtex style)

Working Pages (protected zone)

• Grammar-Based Systems
• Prototyping using Declarative Languages
• Language-Based Tools