Programmiersprachen – Programming Languages
LVA 185.208, VU, 3 ECTS, 2015 S
Third Exercise
Exercise
Develop a syntax-aware editor for programs in the language as developed in
exercise 2.
The editor shall be written in a statically typed functional language like Haskell and ML.
In addition to the usual functionality of an editor (loading, showing, modifying and storing text), the editor shall highlight
- obvious syntactic errors like unbalanced braces and unterminated string literals,
- variables that never can become initialized (as far as can be determined by a simple analysis),
- variables that can become initialized, but are never used.
You can use text attributes like colour, underlining, thickness, inversion and size to highlight the current cursor position, names and other syntactic elements.
It is not necessary (although possible) that the editor runs in its own window.
As a simple solution you can use a text terminal (e.g., xterm) and rewrite all of its contents on each change.
In this exercise it is important to manage data.
At a first glance, that seems to be difficult to do in modern functional languages.
However, there are several simple ways to do that.
Consulting the standard libraries of the used programming system may be helpful to find a good solution.
The Implementation Language
To program in ML we recommend the use of
OCaml.
This system extends ML with object-oriented features.
They support a programming style similar to that of Java.
Please use only the functional concepts of the language to solve the exercise, don't use the object-oriented language extensions.
Information on Haskell can be found on the Haskell page.
Essentially you can select between GHC and Hugs.
GHC is a rather large and efficient system.
You can download an entire development platform including all tools that you will probably need.
Hugs is a simple system based solely on an interpreter.
Because of the better performance, GHC is preferable over Hugs for the solution of this exercise.