A Component-Based Formal Language Workbench
This addresses the challenge for language developers in adopting formal semantics more widely, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal language workbench concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing the effort in formal language specification by introducing the CBS framework, which uses component-based specification and a library of reusable components to facilitate co-evolution of languages and their specifications, with ongoing work on IDE generation.
The CBS framework supports component-based specification of programming languages. It aims to significantly reduce the effort of formal language specification, and thereby encourage language developers to exploit formal semantics more widely. CBS provides an extensive library of reusable language specification components, facilitating co-evolution of languages and their specifications. After introducing CBS and its formal definition, this short paper reports work in progress on generating an IDE for CBS from the definition. It also considers the possibility of supporting component-based language specification in other formal language workbenches.