Tiago L. Alves, Joost Visser. A Case Study in Grammar Engineering. In Dragan Gasevic, Ralf Lämmel, Eric {Van Wyk}, editors, Software Language Engineering, First International Conference, SLE 2008, Toulouse, France, September 29-30, 2008. Revised Selected Papers. Volume 5452 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 285-304, Springer, 2008. [doi]
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 well-tested, 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.