APPLICATION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED ATTRIBUTE GRAMMARS (OOAG) TO SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS

It is recognized as necessary to have a software development environme nt that can simultaneously store software products and maintain their detailed relationships. There exists the cut & paste model based on at tribute grammars, which is effective in maintaining consistency among software products and in automatically maintaining the derived values. This model has a problem however, namely the description of the dynam ical aspect of the software development environment is difficult. From such a viewpoint, an object-oriented attribute grammar type computati on model OOAG has been proposed, which introduces the concept of the m essage passing into attribute grammars. The OOAG is defined with an ex tension and reorganization in regard to the dynamical description func tions. Then, the problem in the cut & past model are discussed. As an example of the problems, it is pointed out that description is difficu lt for the case where the point of referral by the user and the point of modification are different. Such a situation is described by OOAG, demonstrating that OOAG can remedy the problem in the cut & paste mode l.