Adaptable Symbol Table Management by Meta Modeling and Generation of Symbol Table Infrastructures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a meta modeling approach for adaptable symbol table management, enabling automatic generation and customization of symbol tables for language engineering tasks.

Contribution

It presents a symbol table meta model integrated with language grammar meta models, facilitating flexible and automated symbol table infrastructure generation.

Findings

Enables switching between model structure and symbol table

Supports automatic generation of symbol table infrastructure

Allows customization for specific language needs

Abstract

Many textual software languages share common concepts such as defining and referencing elements, hierarchical structures constraining the visibility of names, and allowing for identical names for different element kinds. Symbol tables are useful to handle those reference and visibility concepts. However, developing a symbol table can be a tedious task that leads to an additional effort for the language engineer. This paper presents a symbol table meta model usable to define languagespecific symbol tables. Furthermore, we integrate this symbol table meta model with a meta model of a grammar-based language definition. This enables the language engineer to switch between the model structure and the symbol table as needed. Finally, based on a grammarannotation mechanism, our approach is able to generate a symbol table infrastructure that can be used as is or serve as a basis for custom symbol tables.