A System for Generating Language-Oriented Editors.

It is commonly accepted that language-oriented tools are helpful for constructing programs. In order to construct and extend language-oriented tools easily, meta-tools have been researched. Our interest is to establish a simple and flexible framework for internal representation of programs, internal representation of language-dependent information, and the behavior of language-oriented tools for user's operations. This paper presents a system for generating language-oriented editors based on the object-oriented concepts. Features of the target language are represented as classes and their relations. A program is represented as an abstract syntax tree. Each node in the tree belongs to a nodeclass. Processing of each user's operation is achieved by messages between nodes. For generating more advanced editors, probes, internal-classes, and gates are incorporated into the system. In conclusion, the system generates a flexible and easily extendable language-oriented editor from a target language description in a highly modularized fashion by using the description language which the system provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]