Efficient embedding of strategic attribute grammars via memoization

• Main Author: Macedo, José Nuno Castro
• Publication Date: 2023
• Other Authors: Rodrigues, Emanuel, Viera, Marcos, Saraiva, João
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/89924
• topic: Strategic programming; Attribute grammars; Zippers; Generic traversals

Strategic term re-writing and attribute grammars are two powerful programming techniques widely used in language engineering. The former relies on strategies to apply term rewrite rules in defining large-scale language transformations, while the latter is suitable to express context-dependent language processing algorithms. These two techniques can be expressed and combined via a powerful navigation abstraction: generic zippers. This results in a concise zipper-based embedding offering the expressiveness of both techniques. Such elegant embedding has a severe limitation since it recomputes attribute values. This paper presents a proper and efficient embedding of both techniques. First, attribute values are memoized in the zipper data structure, thus avoiding their re-computation. Moreover, strategic zipper based functions are adapted to access such memoized values. We have implemented our memoized embedding as the Ztrategic library and we benchmarked it against the state-of-the-art Strafunski and Kiama libraries. Our first results show that we are competitive against those two well established libraries.