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Is There Hypothesis for Attribute Grammars?

Authors Emanuel Rodrigues , José Nuno Macedo , João Saraiva

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Grammars and context-free languages
  • Theory of computation → Rewrite systems
  • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging
Keywords
  • Property-based Testing
  • Attribute Grammars
  • Strategic Term Rewriting

Metrics

Abstract

Software testing is essential to ensure software reliability and functionality. Numerous testing techniques have been proposed, and most programming languages provide built-in support for testing. However, these techniques have yet to be integrated into the powerful attribute grammar formalism.
This paper introduces a method to incorporate property-based testing into attribute grammars. We achieve this by embedding attribute grammars in Python which is combined with its powerful Hypothesis property-based testing framework. To validate our approach, we express properties of scope rules in a (nested) block-structured language, commonly found in many (functional) languages.

Cite As Get BibTex

Emanuel Rodrigues, José Nuno Macedo, and João Saraiva. Is There Hypothesis for Attribute Grammars?. In Companion Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (Programming 2025). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 134, pp. 19:1-19:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.Programming.2025.19

Author Details

Emanuel Rodrigues
  • HASLab & INESC TEC, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
José Nuno Macedo
  • HASLab & INESC TEC, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
João Saraiva
  • Department of Informatics, HASLab & INESC TEC, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

Funding

This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project LA/P/0063/2020. DOI 10.54499/LA/P/0063/ 2020.

Supplementary Materials

References

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