A meta-environment for generating programming environments

Over the last decade, considerable progress has been made in solving the problems of automatic generation of programming/development environments, given a formal definition of some programming or specification language. In most cases, research has focused on the functionality and efficiency of the generated environments, and, of course, these aspects will ultimately determine the acceptance of environment generators. However, only marginal attention has been paid to the development process of formal language definitions itself. Assuming that the quality of automatically generated environments will be satisfactory within a few years, the development costs of formal language definitions will then become the next limiting factor determining ultimate success and acceptance of environment generators. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a meta-environment (a development environment for formal language definitions) based on the formalism ASF + SDF. This meta-environment is currently being implemented as part of the Centaur system and is, at least partly, obtained by applying environment generation techniques to the language definition formalism itself. A central problem is providing fully interactive editing of modular language definitions such that modifications made to the language definition during editing can be translated immediately to modifications in the programming environment generated from the original language definition. Therefore, some of the issues addressed are the treatment of formalisms with user-definable syntax and incremental program generation techniques.