Detection of Intentions in Context-Free Grammars

Abstract

A programming language is based on several intentions and design requirements. As this information is reflected in the grammar of the language some intentions can be reverse engineered from the grammar. This paper presents an approach to detect intention instances in context-free grammars to support understanding of the design of languages. Some typical intentions in imperative languages are shown, followed by a discussion how to detect them automatically with a static analysis tool based on graph transformation.