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Towards Language-Parametric Semantic Editor Services Based on Declarative Type System Specifications (Brave New Idea Paper)

Authors Daniel A. A. Pelsmaeker , Hendrik van Antwerpen , Eelco Visser

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LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.26.pdf
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Author Details

Daniel A. A. Pelsmaeker
  • Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Hendrik van Antwerpen
  • Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Eelco Visser
  • Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

Funding

This research was partially funded by the NWO VICI Language Designer’s Workbench project (639.023.206).

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous versions of this paper. We also thank Arjen Rouvoet for his comments and his work on Ministatix, an implementation of the core Statix language we use for prototyping.

Cite As Get BibTex

Daniel A. A. Pelsmaeker, Hendrik van Antwerpen, and Eelco Visser. Towards Language-Parametric Semantic Editor Services Based on Declarative Type System Specifications (Brave New Idea Paper). In 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 134, pp. 26:1-26:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.26

Abstract

Editor services assist programmers to more effectively write and comprehend code. Implementing editor services correctly is not trivial. This paper focuses on the specification of semantic editor services, those that use the semantic model of a program. The specification of refactorings is a common subject of study, but many other semantic editor services have received little attention. We propose a language-parametric approach to the definition of semantic editor services, using a declarative specification of the static semantics of the programming language, and constraint solving. Editor services are specified as constraint problems, and language specifications are used to ensure correctness. We describe our approach for the following semantic editor services: reference resolution, find usages, goto subclasses, code completion, and the extract definition refactoring. We do this in the context of Statix, a constraint language for the specification of type systems. We investigate the specification of editor services in terms of Statix constraints, and the requirements these impose on a suitable solver.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Semantics
Keywords
  • semantics
  • constraint solving
  • Statix
  • name binding
  • editor services
  • reference resolution
  • code completion
  • refactoring

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