A domain-specific language for regular sets of strings and trees

Abstract

We propose a new high-level programming notation, called FIDO, that we have designed t o c oncisely express regular sets of strings or trees. In particular, it can be viewed as a domain-speci c language for the expression of nite-state automata on large alphabets of sometimes astronomical size. FIDO is based on a combination of mathematical logic and programming language concepts. This combination shares no similarities with usual logic programming languages. FIDO compiles into nitestate string or tree automata, so there i s n o c oncept of run-time. It has already been applied to a variety of problems of considerable complexity and practical interest. In the present paper, we motivate the need for a language like FIDO, and discuss our design and its implementation. We show how recursive data types, uni cation, implicit coercions, and subtyping can be merged with a variation of predicate logic, called the Monadic Second-order Logic M2L on trees. FIDO is translated rst into pure M2L via suitable encodings, and nally into nite-state automata through the MONA tool.

A Novel Approach to String Constraint Solving

“…MONA [83] is a tool developed in the '90s that acts as a decision procedure for Monadic Second-Order Logic (M2L) and as a translator to finite-state automata based on BDDs. FIDO [84] is a domain-specific programming formalism translated first into pure M2L via suitable encodings, and finally into FSA through the MONA tool. Another M2L-based solver is PISA [128], a path-and index-sensitive string solver that is applicable for static analysis.…”

Notable design patterns for domain-specific languages

“…Such strategies are often employed in systems written in interpreted declarative languages such as Prolog or Lisp. A representative example of a DSL DSL based on this pattern is FID O FIDO (Klarlund and Schwarzbach, 1997) which is designed to concisely express regular sets of strings or trees. Other cases of DSL DS L-based data speci®cations are the table initialisations generated by yacc (Johnson, 1975) and lex (Lesk, 1975) for the table-driven parsing and lexical analysis automata they create.…”

The pointer assertion logic engine

“…Compared to the WSRT technique used in [14], our choice of describing the backbones as records with pointers rather than as recursive types allow a simpler and more efficient automaton guide to be constructed. Also for efficiency reasons, we compile directly into MONA logic rather than use a more high-level logic, such as FIDO [30].…”