A generalised editor calculus (Short Paper)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized editor calculus that can be adapted to any language's syntax, ensuring error-free editing and supporting incomplete programs, by encoding it into an extended simply typed lambda calculus.

Contribution

It extends existing syntax-directed editor calculus into a more general form and encodes it into a typed lambda calculus for broader applicability.

Findings

Guarantees absence of syntactical errors

Supports incomplete programs during editing

Can be instantiated for any language with given abstract syntax

Abstract

In this paper, we present a generalization of a syntax-directed editor calculus, which can be used to instantiate a specialized syntax-directed editor for any language, given by some abstract syntax. The editor calculus guarantees the absence of syntactical errors while allowing incomplete programs. The generalized editor calculus is then encoded into a simply typed lambda calculus, extended with pairs, booleans, pattern matching and fixed points