Adaptable Symbol Table Management by Meta Modeling and Generation of Symbol Table Infrastructures
This addresses the problem of reducing development effort for language engineers by automating symbol table creation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing meta-modeling and generation techniques.
The paper tackles the tedious task of developing symbol tables for textual software languages by presenting a symbol table meta model integrated with grammar-based language definitions, enabling generation of symbol table infrastructures that can be used directly or customized.
Many textual software languages share common concepts such as defining and referencing elements, hierarchical structures constraining the visibility of names, and allowing for identical names for different element kinds. Symbol tables are useful to handle those reference and visibility concepts. However, developing a symbol table can be a tedious task that leads to an additional effort for the language engineer. This paper presents a symbol table meta model usable to define languagespecific symbol tables. Furthermore, we integrate this symbol table meta model with a meta model of a grammar-based language definition. This enables the language engineer to switch between the model structure and the symbol table as needed. Finally, based on a grammarannotation mechanism, our approach is able to generate a symbol table infrastructure that can be used as is or serve as a basis for custom symbol tables.