The Spoofax Name Binding Language

Gabriƫl Konat, Vlad A. Vergu, Lennart C. L. Kats, Guido Wachsmuth, Eelco Visser. The Spoofax Name Binding Language. In Companion to the 27th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2011, part of SPLASH 2012, Tucson, AR, USA, October 19 - 26, 2012. ACM, 2012. [doi]

Abstract

In textual software languages, names are used to identify program elements such as variables, methods, and classes. Name analysis algorithms resolve names in order to establish references between definitions and uses of names. In this poster, we present the Spoofax Name Binding Language (NBL), a declarative meta-language for the specification of name binding and scope rules, which departs from the programmatic encodings of name binding provided by regular approaches. NBL aspires to become the universal language for name binding, which can be used next to BNF definitions in reference manuals, as well as serve the generation of implementations.