Correctly defined concrete syntax |
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Authors: | Thomas Baar |
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Affiliation: | (1) School of Computer and Communication Sciences, école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland |
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Abstract: | Due to their complexity, the syntax of modern modeling languages is preferably defined in two steps. The abstract syntax identifies
all modeling concepts whereas the concrete syntax should clarify how these concepts are rendered by graphical and/or textual
elements. While the abstract syntax is often defined in form of a metamodel, there does not exist such standard format yet
for concrete syntax definitions. The diversity of definition formats—ranging from EBNF grammars to informal text—is becoming
a major obstacle for advances in modeling language engineering, including the automatic generation of editors. In this paper,
we propose a uniform format for concrete syntax definitions. Our approach captures both textual and graphical model representations
and even allows to assign more than one rendering to the same modeling concept. Consequently, following our approach, a model
can have multiple, fully equivalent representations, but—in order to avoid ambiguities when reading a model representation—two
different models should always have distinguishable representations. We call a syntax definition correct, if all well-formed
models are represented in a non-ambiguous way. As the main contribution of this paper, we present a rigorous analysis technique
to check the correctness of concrete syntax definitions.
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Keywords: | Visual languages Concrete syntax Metamodeling OCL Triple-Graph-Grammars (TGGs) |
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