Toward Modular Implementation of Practical Identifier Completion on Incomplete Program Text

Identifier completion is a widely-used functionality in IDEs like Eclipse and editors like Emacs and vi. In this paper we present how to implement identifier completion for a core of functional languages with a focus on coping with incomplete program text based on error recovery in LR parsing. We believe the present work is a first step toward building practical identifier completion in IDEs for functional languages in modular way by reusing the code in compilers. We also give a specification of the identifier completion and argue that our solution conforms to it.