GIPSY: a generator for incremental programming systems

Abstract

GIPSY (Generator for Incremental Programming Systems) is an experimental system, which produces incremental programming environments from a given language definition. Besides its tasks in a conventional environment, the compiler of a GIPSY generated system serves as a program base by making syntax and semantic information about a program accessible to other tools. The compiler manages a program internally in a general data model and offers well-defined editing operations on this data structure. In order to get short response times incremental compilation techniques are used. Therefore, the paper focuses on the incremental evaluation schemes used in GIPSY generated environments and discusses the steps taken during the translation of the language definition into the language-dependent part of the programming environments. Some experimental results will be shown, demonstrating the effect of incremental evaluation.