Reserved graph grammar: a specification tool for diagrammatic VPLs

Da Qian Zhang*, Kang Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference article published in journalpeer-review

38 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

When implementing textual languages, formal grammars are commonly used to facilitate understanding languages and creating parsers. In the implementation of a diagrammatic visual programming language (VPL), this rarely happens, though graph grammars with their well-established theoretical background may be used as a natural and powerful syntax-definition formalism. Yet all graph grammar parsing algorithms presented up to now are either unable to recognize interesting visual languages or tend to be hopelessly inefficient (with exponential time complexity) when applied to graphs with a large number of nodes and edges. This paper presents a context-sensitive graph grammar called reserved graph grammar, which can explicitly, efficiently and completely describe the syntax of a wide range of diagrams using labeled graphs. Moreover, its parsing algorithm is of polynomial time complexity in most cases.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)284-291
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Proceedings
Publication statusPublished - 1997
Externally publishedYes
EventProceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, VL97 - Isle of Capri, Italy
Duration: 23 Sept 199726 Sept 1997

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