A Case Study in Grammar Engineering
A joint study of University of Minho and SIG describes the application of well-established software engineering techniques to the development of a grammar. This study shows that grammars like any other software artifact, require the use of testing and coverage analysis, and quality monitoring.
A Case Study in Grammar Engineering
by Tiago L. Alves (University of Minho and SIG), and Joost Visser (SIG)
Published in the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2008), September 29-30, 2008, Toulouse, France.
This paper describes a case study about how well-established software engineering techniques can be applied to the development of a grammar. The employed development methodology can be described as iterative grammar engineering and includes the application of techniques such as grammar metrics, unit testing, and test coverage analysis. The result is a grammar of industrial strength, in the sense that it is welltested, it can be used for fast parsing of high volumes of code, and it allows automatic generation of support for syntax tree representation, traversal, and interchange.
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