Adding Concrete Syntax to a Prolog-Based Program Synthesis System (Extended Abstract)

Bernd Fischer, Eelco Visser. Adding Concrete Syntax to a Prolog-Based Program Synthesis System (Extended Abstract). In Maurice Bruynooghe, editor, Logic Based Program Synthesis and Transformation, 13th International Symposium LOPSTR 2003, Uppsala, Sweden, August 25-27, 2003, Revised Selected Papers. Volume 3018 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 56-58, Springer, 2003. [doi]

Abstract

Program generation and transformation systems work on two language levels, the object-level (i.e., the language of the manipulated programs), and the meta-level (i.e., the implementation language of the system itself). The meta-level representations of object-level program fragments are usually built in an essentially syntax-free fashion using the operations provided by the meta-language. However, syntax matters and a large conceptual distance between the two languages makes it difficult to maintain and extend such systems. Here we describe how an existing Prolog-based system can gradually be retrofitted with concrete object-level syntax using the approach outlined in [5], thus shrinking this distance.