In the Language Designer’s Workbench project we are extending the Spoofax Language Workbench with meta-languages to declaratively specify the syntax, name binding rules, type rules, and operational semantics of a programming language design such that a variety of artifacts including parsers, static analyzers, interpreters, and IDE editor services can be derived and properties can be verified automatically. In this presentation I will talk about declarative specification for two aspects of language design: syntax and name binding.

First, I discuss the idea of declarative syntax definition as supported by grammar formalisms based on generalized parsing using the SDF3 syntax definition formalism as example. With SDF3, the language designer defines syntax in terms of productions and declarative disambiguation rules. This requires understanding a language in term of (tree) structure instead of the operational implementation of parsers. As a result, syntax definitions can be used for a range of language processors including parsers, formatters, syntax coloring, outline view, syntactic completion.

Second, I discuss our recent work on the declarative specification of name binding rules, that takes inspiration from declarative syntax definition. The NaBL name binding language supports definition of name binding rules in terms of its fundamental concepts: declarations, references, scopes, and imports. I will present the theory of name resolution that we have recently developed to provide a semantics for name binding languages such as NaBL.

Eelco Visser is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor of Computer Science at Delft University of Technology. He received a master’s and doctorate in computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Previously he served as postdoc at the Oregon Graduate Institute, as Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, and as Associate Professor at TU Delft.

His research interests include programming languages, software language engineering, domain-specific programming languages, program transformation, software security, and interaction design. With his students he has designed and implemented the Spoofax language workbench, as well as many domain-specific languages, including DSLs for syntax definition (SDF), program transformation (Stratego), software deployment (Nix), web application development (WebDSL), and mobile phone applications (mobl). He is the lead developer of the researchr bibliography management system and the WebLab learning management system.