Abstract

The OCL 2.0 specification defines explicitly a concrete and an abstract syntax. The concrete syntax allows modelers to write down OCL expressions in a textual way. The abstract syntax represents the concepts of OCL using a MOF compliant metamodel. OCL 2.0 implementations should follow this specification. In doing so emphasis is placed on the fact that at the end of the processing a tool should produce the same well-formed instance of the abstract syntax as given in the specification. This offers the possibility to implement OCL-like languages with the same semantics that are for example easier to use for business modelers. Therefore we looked for a parser technique that helps us to generate an OCL parser to a large extent. In this paper we present the technique we developed and proved within the scope of the Dresden OCL Toolkit. The resulting Dresden OCL2 parser is especially characterized by using a generation approach not only based on a context-free grammar but syntax of an OCL expression.