PAG ( Prototyping with Attribute Grammars ) is an environment that promotes active learning in courses on language processing (e.g. compiler construction and computational linguistics). In PAG, learners can specify the syntax and the semantics of their languages with attribute grammars. Then, the environment generates prototypes of processors for the languages specified which learners can test with different inputs. For each valid input the prototypes produce one or more decorated syntax trees, which learners can navigate using the semantic equations in the original grammar. In this paper we describe the environment and we report its educational uses.

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Vocabularies are linguistic resources that make it possible to access knowledge through words. They can constitute a mechanism to identify, describe, explore, and access all the digital resources with informational content pertaining to a specific knowledge domain. In this regard, they play a key role as systems for the representation and organization of knowledge in environments in which content is created and used in a collaborative and free manner, as is the case of social wikis and blogs on the Internet or educational content in e-learning environments. In e-learning environments, electronic vocabularies (e-vocabularies) constitute a mechanism for conceptual representation of digital educational resources. They enable human and software agents either to locate and interpret resource content in large digital repositories, including the web, or to use them (vocabularies) as an educational resource by itself to learn a discipline terminology. This review article describes what e-vocabularies are, what they are like, how they are used, how they work, and what they contribute to the retrieval of digital educational resources. The goal is to contribute to a clearer view of the concepts which we regard as crucial to understand e-vocabularies and their use in the field of e-learning to describe and retrieve digital educational resources.

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