Attribute grammars are a formalism for specifying programming languages. They have been applied to a great number of systems automatically producing language implementations from their specifications. The systems and their specification languages can be evaluated and classified according to their level of application support, linguistic characteristics, and degree of automation. A survey of attribute grammar-based specification languages is given. The modern advanced specification languages extend the core attribute grammar model with concepts and primitives from established programming paradigms. The main ideas behind the developed attribute grammar paradigms are discussed, and representative specification languages are presented with a common example grammar. The presentation is founded on mapping elements of attribute grammars to their counterparts in programming languages. This methodology of integrating two problem-solving disciplines together is explored with a classification of the paradigms into structured, modular, object-oriented, logic, and functional attribute grammars. The taxonomy is complemented by introducing approaches based on an implicit parallel or incremental attribute evaluation paradigm.

Making changes safely to programs requires program comprehension and satisfaction of the information needs of software maintainers. In this paper we provide insights into improving hypertext‐based software maintenance support by analyzing those information needs. There exists a series of four earlier, detailed‐level empirical studies on the information needs of professional C program maintainers. We focus on these studies, synthesize their results and determine sources from which the required information might be attained. An experimental research tool, the HyperSoft system, is used to demonstrate the satisfaction of information needs and the system is analytically evaluated against the needs explored by the empirical studies. HyperSoft is based on our transient hypertext approach for software maintenance support. HyperSoft provides automatically generated hypertextual access structures and software visualizations. The results show that transient hypertext is a well‐suited representational form of the typically required versatile information. The discussion also covers related tools and the main features for providing the information required by maintainers are identified. The results show that the focus areas of these tools vary considerably. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An application framework is a collection of classes implementing the shared architecture of a family of applications. A technique is proposed for defining the specialization interface of a framework in such a way that it can be used to automatically produce a task-driven programming environment for guiding the application development process. Using the environment, the application developer can incrementally construct an application that follows the conventions implied by the framework architecture. The environment provides specialization instructions adapting automatically to the application-specific context, and an integrated source code editor which responds to actions that conflict with the given specialization interface. The main characteristics and implementation principles of the tool are explained.

An application framework is a collection of classes implementing the shared architecture of a family of applications. It is shown how the specialization interface ("hot spots") of a framework can be annotated with specialization patterns to provide task-based guidance for the framework specialization process. The specialization patterns define various structural, semantic, and coding constraints over the applications derived from the framework. We also present a tool that supports both the framework development process and the framework specialization process, based on the notion of specialization patterns. We will outline the basic concepts of the tool and discuss techniques to identify and specify specialization patterns as required by the tool. These techniques have been applied in realistic case studies for creating programming environments for application frameworks.

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