Tool Support for Data Structures

Linked records are a general mechanism to build data structures like lists, trees, and graphs. Most high-level programming languages only provide the definition of record types, an operator for component selection, and allocation of record storage. We propose to specify complete graph structures by context-free grammars. A tool can be used to transform such a specification into a set of record type declarations and program code for features like denotations for record values, input and output for record values and complete graphs, or interactive browsers for data structures. We describe such a tool called ast (generator for abstract syntax trees), its specification language, the advantages of this approach, and our current experiences. Currently, the main application is the specification of attributed abstract syntax trees within compilers. We finally discuss the relationship to related work.