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Towards tool support for spreadsheet-based domain-specific languages

Published:26 October 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Spreadsheets are commonly used by non-programmers to store data in a structured form, this data can in some cases be considered to be a program in a domain-specific language (DSL). Unlike ordinary text-based domain-specific languages, there is however currently no formalism for expressing the syntax of such spreadsheet-based DSLs (SDSLs), and there is no tool support for automatically generating language infrastructure such as parsers and IDE support. In this paper we define a simple notion of two-dimensional grammars for SDSLs, and show how such grammars can be used for automatically generating parsers that extract structured data from a spreadsheet in the form of an AST. We demonstrate automatic generation of parsers for a number of examples, including the questionnaire DSL from LWC2014 and a DSL for writing safety specifications.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 51, Issue 3
      GPCE '15
      March 2016
      184 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2936314
      • Editor:
      • Andy Gill
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        GPCE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences
        October 2015
        184 pages
        ISBN:9781450336871
        DOI:10.1145/2814204

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 26 October 2015

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