Reasonably Programmable Syntax

Abstract

Programming languages commonly provide syntactic sugar that decreases the syntactic cost of working with certain standard library constructs. For example, Standard ML builds in syntactic sugar for constructing and pattern matching on lists. Third-party library providers are, justifiably, envious of this special arrangement. After all, it is not difficult to find other situations where library-specific syntactic sugar might be useful. For example, (1) clients of a collections library might like syntactic sugar for finite sets and dictionaries; (2) clients of a web programming library might like syntactic sugar for HTML and JSON values; (3) a compiler writer might like syntactic sugar for the terms of the object language or various intermediate languages of interest; and (4) clients of a chemistry library might like syntactic sugar for chemical structures based on the SMILES standard.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 15, 2017
Accession Number
AD1180389

Entities

People

  • Cyrus Omar

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Automata Theory
  • Automatic Programming
  • Coding
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Decoding
  • Formal Languages
  • Grammars
  • Html
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Language
  • Mathematics
  • Military Research
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Development

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Educational Psychology
  • Library and Information Science