[antlr-interest] The idea of semantic analyzer generator

[John B. Brodie]

Greetings!
On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 23:27 +0300, GreyAx wrote:
> I'm looking for topics to investigate in part of my master thesis. I'm interesting in verification, 
> static code analysis and so on. I have an idea, which I want to implement and integrate with ANTLR,
> please give me any feedback about it.
> 
> I'd started work with ANTLR till some time ago and my colleagues use it sometimes (to create DSL).
> And as I see, there is some unsolved problems in ANTLR. And IMHO the one of the most important is 
> that user have to write semantic analyzer by hand (of course he or she could and should use tree
> grammars for doing it and could implement custom actions for checking some semantic rules, but in
> fact the semantic within such approach is only a code written in some ordinary programming
> language (C\C#\Java\...).  I wonder would it be useful for user to use semantic analyzer generation
> module within ANLTR? I think it could be implemented as a new grammar language for describing
> semantic rules or something like that. Could somebody point out to such things? Are there any
> semantic analyzer generators? And if there isn't any, is such thing looks not very useful for
> practical using?
> 

I too am quite interested in this topic -- but have been diverted away
from it for quite some time.

I think the key here is defining the meta-notation for describing the
semantic analysis to be performed. It would seem that in defining the
meta-notation you might just end up with yet another programming
language.....

Altho some researchers appear to have obtained some interesting results.
Google for "action semantics" and "asf+sdf" and i am sure there are
others along those lines.... You might try also googling "suif" and/or
"llvm" but these last two seem to be more related to the code generation
phase rather than the analysis phase.

I quite like the Post system notation that Benjamin Pierce uses in his
book "Types and Programming Languages", MIT Press, 2002, ISBN
0-262-16209-1

Hope this helps
   -jbb