Abstract

Code completion is an editor service that suggests keywords and identifiers that are relevant at the caret location in the editor, from which the user can choose to either insert one or continue typing. This reduces coding errors and aids in discovering the possibilities in a language or API. Providing a code completion editor service for a new programming language requires development effort in addition to the effort required for defining the language. The goal of this work is to automatically produce an intelligent editor-agnostic code completion editor service that is parameterized only by the declarative specification of the language. We implement our approach in the Spoofax language workbench, which enables language developers to provide a declarative specification of their new programming language. We will use the declarative specification to produce a platform-agnostic code completion editor service for Spoofax languages automatically