Mark G. J. van den Brand, Pierre-Etienne Moreau, Jurgen J. Vinju. Environments for Term Rewriting Engines for Free!. In Robert Nieuwenhuis, editor, Rewriting Techniques and Applications, 14th International Conference, RTA 2003, Valencia, Spain, June 9-11, 2003, Proceedings. Volume 2706 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 424-435, Springer, 2003. [doi]
Term rewriting can only be applied if practical implementations of term rewriting engines exist. New rewriting engines are designed and implemented either to experiment with new (theoretical) results or to be able to tackle new application areas. In this paper we present the Meta-Environment: an environment for rapidly implementing the syntax and semantics of term rewriting based formalisms. We provide not only the basic building blocks, but complete interactive programming environments that only need to be instantiated by the details of a new formalism.