Partial Parsing for Structured Editors

Abstract

Creating structured editors, which maintain a valid syntax tree at all times rather than allowing to edit program text, is typically a time consuming task. Recent work has investigated the use of existing general-purpose language grammars as a basis for automatically generating structured editors, thus considerably reducing the effort required. However, in these generated editors, input occurs through menu and mouse-based interaction, rather than via keyboard entry that is familiar to most users.

In this paper we introduce modifications to a parser of general-purpose programming language grammars to support keyboard-centric interactions with generated structured editors. Specifically, we describe a system we call partial parsing to autocomplete language structures, removing the need for a menu of language constructs in favor of keyboard-based disambiguation. We demonstrate our system's applicability and performance for use in interactive, generated structured editors. Our system thus constitutes a step towards making structured editors generated from language grammars usable with more efficient and familiar keyboard-centric interactions.