Comparing Static Semantics Specifications for the IceDust DSL: A Case Study of Statix

Reusable tools for engineering software languages can bridge the gap between formal specification and implementation, lowering the bar for engineers to design and implement programming languages. Among such tools belong NaBL2 and its successor Statix, which are meta-languages for declaratively specifying the static semantics of programming...

Verifying Well-Typedness Preservation of Refactorings using Scope Graphs

The goal of automated refactoring is to reduce maintenance effort. To realize this, programmers need to be able to trust or manually check that refactorings actually preserve behavior. To allow programmers to focus on such checks, automated refactorings should preserve program well-typedness. However, historically automated refactorings in...

Scope Graphs: The Story so Far

Static name binding (i.e., associating references with appropriate declarations) is an essential aspect of programming languages. However, it is usually treated in an unprincipled manner, often leaving a gap between formalization and implementation. The scope graph formalism mitigates these deficiencies by providing a well-defined, first...

Knowing when to ask: Sound scheduling of name resolution in type checkers derived from declarative specifications

There is a large gap between the specification of type systems and the implementation of their type checkers, which impedes reasoning about the soundness of the type checker with respect to the specification. A vision to close this gap is to automatically obtain type checkers from declarative programming language specifications. This moves...

The Static Semantics of the Green-Marl Graph Analysis Language: Formal Specification, Declarative Implementation and Integration with a Compiler Back-end

Green-Marl is a domain specific language for efficient graph analysis. In this thesis, we define the formal static semantics of the language and provide an implementation in the Spoofax language workbench. The type system of Green-Marl includes limited forms of name-dependent types, overloading, parametric polymorphism, and inference. We give a...