Towards the derivation of an experimental programming environment from language formal specifications

The paper is concerned with a methodology for deriving an integrated programming environment for a specific programming language, from a set of language independent tools and a formal definition of the programming language. The general ideas underlying the design of an integrated programming environment and their impact upon interactive development are considered first. A minimal set of language independent tools (including project data base and management tools) is briefly sketched. Finally, the minimal set of language specific tools (from editor to compiler) is introduced. Our approach is to define some general tools (abstract syntax manipulation, editing and debugging commands, a parser generator, an executable specification metalanguage) which can be used to obtain a set of granular language-dependent tools (syntax driven editor, parser, static analyzer, interpreter, debugger, code generator) from formal syntactic and semantic language definitions. An experimental version of the environment is actually under development and will be tested on a subset of ADA.