An Integrated Approach to the Generation of Environments from Formal Specifications

This paper describes an experiment in the use of a persistent object store to support the construction and execution of a software development environment. This development environment presents the user with language specific editors which provide access to incremental parsers. The editors and parsers are automatically generated from a formal language specification based on attribute grammars. This is facilitated through the persistent management of types and values and a dynamically callable compiler. We demonstrate that the provision of a persistent object store gives the system designer more freedom and that this leads to the construction of novel software architectures.