Abstract

Programming languages and programming tasks are rarely a perfect fit: a program can often be clarified by using a number of language features tailored to the task at hand. While domain specific languages provide such features, they lock programmers into a language tailored for one specific domain while their problem may span several domains. We would instead like to add domain specific language features, from various domains, to a base language. The cost of adding such features is perceived to be high, but if the base language could be implemented in a highly modular fashion, this cost could be lowered. Achieving such modularization is the goal of Intentional Programming.
In this talk, I'll introduce "forwarding", a technique for providing default attribute definitions in attribute grammars that is helpful in the modular implementation of programming languages. Although it is but a small extension to standard higher-order attribute grammars it provides some of the modularity features we would like in implementing extensible programming languages.

Dr. Eric Van Wyk received a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1989. He received a M.S. degree in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1998, both in Computer Science from the University of Iowa working with Teodor Rus. For the last 3 years he has been a post doctoral researcher at the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University in Oxford, England working on an extensible programming language project called Intentional Programming. In January 2002, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.