While creating a few samples, I noticed again how annoying and redundant it is to have to generate signatures. If you’re using concrete object syntax, then you have to specify a .meta file and all the required information is in the parse table referred to from .meta file, so there is really no reason to have to generate a signature separately. The compiler could just open the parse table, and extract the signature from the productions on the fly. This will make it easier to get started: just define a grammar, compile it to a parse table and get started writing Stratego right away.

Note that this is somewhat related to the xtar idea we had some years ago. There should be a cleaner concept of a plugin for using a certain object language in Stratego. This can be done together with the introduction of parse table composition.

Submitted on 26 June 2007 at 18:15