SPLASH 2014
Mon 20 - Fri 24 October 2014 Portland, Oregon, United States

Oliveira and Cook (2012) and Oliveira et al. (2013) have recently introduced object algebras as a program structuring technique to improve the modularity and extensibility of programs. We analyze the relationship between object algebras and attribute grammars (AGs), a formalism to augment context-free grammars with attributes. We present an an extension of the object algebra technique with which the full class of L-attributed grammars – an important class of AGs that corresponds to one-pass compilers – can be encoded in Scala. The encoding is modular (attributes can be defined and type-checked separately), scalable (the size of the encoding is linear in the size of the AG specification) and compositional (each AG artefact is represented as a semantic object of the host language). To validate these claims, we have formalized the encoding and we have re-implemented a one-pass compiler for a subset of C with our technique. We also discuss how advanced features of modern AG systems, such as higher-order and parameterized attributes, reference attributes, and forwarding can be supported.