The ASF+SDF Meta-environment: A Component-Based Language Development Environment

Mark G. J. van den Brand, Arie van Deursen, Jan Heering, H. A. de Jong, Merijn de Jonge, Tobias Kuipers, Paul Klint, Leon Moonen, Pieter A. Olivier, Jeroen Scheerder, Jurgen J. Vinju, Eelco Visser, Joost Visser. The ASF+SDF Meta-environment: A Component-Based Language Development Environment. In Reinhard Wilhelm, editor, Compiler Construction, 10th International Conference, CC 2001 Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2001 Genova, Italy, April 2-6, 2001, Proceedings. Volume 2027 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 365-370, Springer, 2001. [doi]

Abstract

The Asf+Sdf Meta-environment is an interactive development environment for the automatic generation of interactive systems for constructing language definitions and generating tools for them. Over the years, this system has been used in a variety of academic and commercial projects ranging from formal program manipulation to conversion of COBOL systems. Since the existing implementation of the Meta-environment started exhibiting more and more characteristics of a legacy system, we decided to build a completely new, component-based, version. We demonstrate this new system and stress its open architecture.