SLE 2020
13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2020)

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13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2020), November 16-17, 2020, Virtual, USA

SLE 2020 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

Frontmatter

Title Page

Message from the Chairs
Welcome to the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) held in November 2020 as part of SPLASH 2020. This is the first fully online edition of SLE due to the effects of COVID-19. Despite the many challenges this has caused, the SLE programme is once again worthy of your consideration!

SLE 2020 Organization

Papers

Gradually Typing Strategies
Jeff Smits and Eelco Visser
(Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
The Stratego language supports program transformation by means of term rewriting with programmable rewriting strategies. Stratego's traversal primitives support concise definition of generic tree traversals. Stratego is a dynamically typed language because its features cannot be captured fully by a static type system. While dynamic typing makes for a flexible programming model, it also leads to unintended type errors, code that is harder to maintain, and missed opportunities for optimization.
In this paper, we introduce a gradual type system for Stratego that combines the flexibility of dynamically typed generic programming, where needed, with the safety of statically declared and enforced types, where possible. To make sure that statically typed code cannot go wrong, all access to statically typed code from dynamically typed code is protected by dynamic type checks (casts). The type system is backwards compatible such that types can be introduced incrementally to existing Stratego programs. We formally define a type system for Core Gradual Stratego, discuss its implementation in a new type checker for Stratego, and present an evaluation of its impact on Stratego programs.

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Artifacts Functional

A Family of Languages for Trustworthy Agent-Based Simulation
Steffen Zschaler and Fiona A. C. Polack
(King's College London, UK; Keele University, UK)
Simulation is a key tool for researching complex system behaviour. Agent-based simulation has been applied across domains, such as biology, health, economics and urban sciences. However, engineering robust, efficient, maintainable, and reliable agent-based simulations is challenging. We present a vision for engineering agent simulations comprising a family of domain-specific modelling languages (DSMLs) that integrates core software engineering, validation and simulation experimentation. We relate the vision to examples of principled simulation, to show how the DSMLs would improve robustness, efficiency, and maintainability of simulations. Focusing on how to demonstrate the fitness for purpose of a simulator, the envisaged approach supports bi-directional transparency and traceability between the original domain understanding to the implementation, interpretation of results and evaluation of hypotheses.

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Annotating Executable DSLs with Energy Estimation Formulas
Thibault Béziers la Fosse, Massimo Tisi, Jean-Marie Mottu, and Gerson Sunyé
(IMT Atlantique, France; ICAM, France; LS2N, France; University of Nantes, France)
Reducing the energy consumption of a complex, especially cyber-physical, system is a cross-cutting concern through the system layers, and typically requires long feedback loops between experts in several engineering disciplines. Having an immediate automatic estimation of the global system consumption at design-time would significantly accelerate this process, but cross-layer tools are missing in several domains.
Executable domain-specific modeling languages (xDSLs) can be used to design several layers of the system under development in an integrated view. By including the behavioral specification for software and physical components of the system, they are an effective source artifact for cross-layer energy estimation.
In this paper we propose EEL, a language for annotating xDSL primitives with energy-related properties, i.e. how their execution would contribute to the energy consumption on a specific runtime platform. Given an xDSL, energy specialists create EEL models of that xDSL for each considered runtime platform. The models are used at design time, to predict the energy consumption of the real systems. This avoids the need of energetic analysis by deployment and measurement on all runtime platforms, that is slow and expensive.
We augment an existing language workbench for xDSLs with an editor for EEL models and a component that computes energy-consumption estimations during model editing. The evaluation shows that EEL can be used to represent estimation models from literature, and provide useful predictions.

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A Precedence-Driven Approach for Concurrent Model Synchronization Scenarios using Triple Graph Grammars
Lars Fritsche, Jens Kosiol, Adrian Möller, Andy Schürr, and Gabriele Taentzer
(TU Darmstadt, Germany; University of Marburg, Germany)
Concurrent model synchronization is the task of restoring consistency between two correlated models after they have been changed concurrently and independently. To determine whether such concurrent model changes conflict with each other and to resolve these conflicts taking domain- or user-specific preferences into account is highly challenging. In this paper, we present a framework for concurrent model synchronization algorithms based on Triple Graph Grammars (TGGs). TGGs specify the consistency of correlated models using grammar rules; these rules can be used to derive different consistency restoration operations. Using TGGs, we infer a causal dependency relation for model elements that enables us to detect conflicts non-invasively. Different kinds of conflicts are detected first and resolved by the subsequent conflict resolution process. Users configure the overall synchronization process by orchestrating the application of consistency restoration fragments according to several conflict resolution strategies to achieve individual synchronization goals. As proof of concept, we have implemented this framework in the model transformation tool eMoflon. Our initial evaluation shows that the runtime of our presented approach scales with the size of model changes and conflicts, rather than model size.

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A Search-Based and Fault-Tolerant Approach to Concurrent Model Synchronisation
Nils Weidmann, Lars Fritsche, and Anthony Anjorin
(University of Paderborn, Germany; TU Darmstadt, Germany; IAV, Germany)
In collaboration scenarios, we often encounter situations in which semantically interrelated models are changed concurrently. Concurrent model synchronization denotes the task of keeping these models consistent by propagating changes between them. This is challenging as changes can contradict each other and thus be in conflict. A problem with current synchronisation approaches is that they are often nondeterministic, i.e., the order in which changes are propagated is essential for the result. Furthermore, a common limitation is that the involved models must have been in a consistent state at some point, and that the applied changes are at least valid for the domain in which they were made. We propose a hybrid approach based on Triple Graph Grammars (TGGs) and Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to overcome these issues: TGGs are a grammar-based means that supplies us with a superset of possible synchronization solutions, forming a search space from which an optimum solution incorporating user-defined preferences can be chosen by ILP. Therefore, the proposed method combines configurability by comprising expert knowledge via TGGs with the flexible input handling of search-based techniques: By accepting arbitrary graph structures as input models, the approach is tolerant towards errors induced during the modelling process, i.e., it can cope with input models which do not conform to their metamodel or which cannot be generated by the TGG at hand. The approach is implemented in the model transformation tool eMoflon and evaluated regarding scalability for growing model sizes and an increasing number of changes.

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Software Language Engineers’ Worst Nightmare
Vadim Zaytsev
(University of Twente, Netherlands)
Many techniques in software language engineering get their first validation by being prototyped to work on one particular language such as Java, Scala, Scheme, or ML, or a subset of such a language. Claims of their generalisability, as well as discussion on potential threats to their external validity, are often based on authors' ad hoc understanding of the world outside their usual comfort zone. To facilitate and simplify such discussions by providing a solid measurable ground, we propose a language called BabyCobol, which was specifically designed to contain features that turn processing legacy programming languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/I, REXX, CLIST, and 4GLs (fourth generation languages), into such a challenge. The language is minimal by design so that it can help to quickly find weaknesses in frameworks making them inapplicable to dealing with legacy software. However, applying new techniques of software language engineering and reverse engineering to such a small language will not be too tedious and overwhelming. BabyCobol was designed in collaboration with industrial compiler developers by systematically traversing features of several second, third and fourth generation languages to identify the core culprits in making development of compiler for legacy languages difficult.

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Video

Principles and Patterns of JastAdd-Style Reference Attribute Grammars
Niklas Fors, Emma Söderberg, and Görel Hedin
(Lund University, Sweden)
Reference attribute grammars (RAGs) have reached a level of maturity where they are supported by several tools, and have gained traction in both academic and industrial language tool development. However, despite a lot of accumulated knowledge of how to best develop RAGs in practice, there is limited support to guide practitioners.
In this paper, we address this issue by focusing on one RAG tool, JastAdd, and by defining principles and patterns for development of RAGs with this tool. We evaluate the proposed principles and patterns with an exploratory empirical study with 14 practitioners, with a mix of beginners and experienced users from both academia and industry. The results indicate that the principles and patterns capture the practice of developing JastAdd RAGs well, help practitioners to become aware of useful patterns, and provide a common language to more efficiently reason about the practice of developing JastAdd RAGs.

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An Interactive Feedback System for Grammar Development (Tool Paper)
Chelsea Barraball, Moeketsi Raselimo, and Bernd Fischer
(Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
We describe gtutr, an interactive feedback system designed to assist students in developing context-free grammars and corresponding ANTLR parsers. It intelligently controls students' access to a large test suite for the target language. After each submission, gtutr analyzes any failing tests and uses the Needleman-Wunsch sequence alignment algorithm over the tests' rule traces to identify and eliminate similar failing tests. This reduces the redundancy in the feedback
given to the students and prevents them from being overloaded. gtutr uses simple gamification to encourage independent problem solving by students: it gives as little information as possible, and students need to prompt the system for further details such as failing tests similar to or different from already seen tests, or even for hints about rules that are the most likely to contain faults. It tracks the students' information requests and uses this to attenuate marks following an instructor-set penalty schema. The system also visualizes test outcomes over multiple submissions, helping students to keep track of the effects of their changes as their grammar development progresses.

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Extrinsically Typed Operational Semantics for Functional Languages
Matteo Cimini, Dale Miller, and Jeremy G. Siek
(University of Massachusetts at Lowell, USA; Inria, France; École Polytechnique, France; Indiana University, USA)
We present a type system over language definitions that classifies parts of the operational semantics of a language in input, and models a common language design organization. The resulting typing discipline guarantees that the language at hand is automatically type sound.
Thanks to the use of types to model language design, our type checker has a high-level view on the language being analyzed and can report messages using the same jargon of language designers.
We have implemented our type system in the lang-n-check tool, and we have applied it to derive the type soundness of several functional languages, including those with recursive types, polymorphism, exceptions, lists, sums, and several common types and operators.

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Towards the Optical Character Recognition of DSLs
Jorge Perianez-Pascual, Roberto Rodriguez-Echeverria, Loli Burgueño, and Jordi Cabot
(University of Extremadura, Spain; Open University of Catalonia, Spain)
OCR engines aim to identify and extract text strings fromdocuments or images. While current efforts focus mostly inmainstream languages, there is little support for program-ming or domain-specific languages (DSLs). In this paper, wepresent our vision about the current state of OCR recognitionfor DSLs and its challenges. We discuss some strategies toimprove the OCR quality applied to DSL textual expressionsby leveraging DSL specifications and domain data. To bettersupport our ideas we present the preliminary results of anempirical study and outline a research roadmap.

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Artifacts Functional

Test Case Generation from Context-Free Grammars using Generalized Traversal of LR-Automata
Christoff Rossouw and Bernd Fischer
(Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
Test case generation from context-free grammars typically uses the grammar's production rules to directly construct words that cover specific sets of derivations. Here, we investigate test case generation by traversing graphs derived from the LR-automata corresponding to the grammars. We develop a new algorithm that generates positive test cases by covering all edges between pairs of directly connected states in a two-phase breadth-first path search. The algorithm iterates over all edges stemming from shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts, using a technique similar to the stack duplication used in GLR parsing. We then extend our algorithm to generate negative (i.e., syntactically invalid) test cases, by applying different edge mutation operations during the extraction of test cases from paths.

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Artifacts Functional

Featherweight Swift: A Core Calculus for Swift’s Type System
Dimitri Racordon and Didier Buchs
(University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Swift is a modern general-purpose programming language, designed to be a replacement for C-based languages. Although primarily directed at development of applications for Apple's operating systems, Swift's adoption has been growing steadily in other domains, ranging from server-side services to machine learning. This success can be partly attributed to a rich type system that enables the design of safe, fast, and expressive programming interfaces. Unfortunately, this richness comes at the cost of complexity, setting a high entry barrier to exploit Swift's full potential. Furthermore, existing documentation typically only relies on examples, leaving new users with little help to build a deeper understanding of the underlying rules and mechanisms.
This paper aims to tackle this issue by laying out the foundations for a formal framework to reason about Swift's type system. We introduce Featherweight Swift, a minimal language stripped of all features not essential to describe its typing rules. Featherweight Swift features classes and protocol inheritance, supports retroactive modeling, and emulates Swift's overriding mechanisms. Yet its formalization fits on a few pages. We present Featherweight Swift's syntax and semantics. We then elaborate on the usability of our framework to reason about Swift's features, future extensions, and implementation by discussing a bug in Swift's compiler, discovered throughout the design of our calculus.

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Untangling Mechanized Proofs
Clément Pit-Claudel
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Proof assistants like Coq, Lean, or HOL4 rely heavily on stateful meta-programs called scripts to assemble proofs. Unlike pen-and-paper proofs, proof scripts only describe the steps to take (induct on x, apply a theorem, …), not the states that these steps lead to; as a result, plain proof scripts are essentially incomprehensible without the assistance of an interactive user interface able to run the script and show the corresponding proof states.
Until now, the standard process to communicate a proof without forcing readers to execute its script was to manually copy-paste intermediate proof states into the script, as source code comments — a tedious and error-prone exercise. Additional prose (such as for a book or tutorial) was likewise embedded in comments, preserving executability at the cost of a mediocre text-editing experience.
This paper describes a new approach to the development and dissemination of literate proof scripts, with a focus on the Coq proof assistant. Specifically, we describe two contributions: a compiler that interleaves Coq’s output with the original proof script to produce interactive webpages that are complete, self-contained presentations of Coq proofs; and a new literate programming toolkit that allows authors to switch seamlessly between prose- and code-oriented views of the same sources, by translating back and forth between reStructuredText documents and literate Coq source files. In combination, these tools offer a new way to write, communicate, and preserve proofs, combining the flexibility of procedural proof scripts and the intelligibility of declarative proofs.

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Monadification of Attribute Grammars
Dawn Michaelson and Eric Van Wyk
(University of Minnesota, USA)
We describe a monadification process for attribute grammars for more concisely written attribute equations, closer to the style of inference rules used in traditional typing and evaluation specifications. Inference rules specifying, for example, a typing relation typically consider only typable expressions, whereas well-defined attribute grammars explicitly determine attribute values for any term, including untypable ones. The monadification approach lets one represent, for example, types as monadic optional/maybe values, but write non-monadic equations over the value inside the monad that only specify the rules for a correct typing, leading to more concise specifications. The missing failure cases are handled by a rewriting that inserts monadic return, bind, and failure operations to produce a well-defined attribute grammar that handles untypable trees. Thus, one can think in terms of a type T and not the actual monadic type M(T). To formalize this notion, typing and evaluation relations are given for the original and rewritten equations. The rewriting is total, preserves types, and a correctness property relating values of original and rewritten equations is given. A prototype implementation illustrates the benefits with examples such as typing of the simply-typed lambda calculus with Booleans, evaluation of the same, and type inference in Caml Light.

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Behavior Trees in Action: A Study of Robotics Applications
Razan Ghzouli, Thorsten Berger, Einar Broch Johnsen, Swaib Dragule, and Andrzej Wąsowski
(Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; University of Gothenburg, Sweden; University of Oslo, Norway; IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Autonomous robots combine a variety of skills to form increasingly complex behaviors called missions. While the skills are often programmed at a relatively low level of abstraction, their coordination is architecturally separated and often expressed in higher-level languages or frameworks. Recently, the language of Behavior Trees gained attention among roboticists for this reason. Originally designed for computer games to model autonomous actors, Behavior Trees offer an extensible tree-based representation of missions. However, even though, several implementations of the language are in use, little is known about its usage and scope in the real world. How do behavior trees relate to traditional languages for describing behavior? How are behavior tree concepts used in applications? What are the benefits of using them?
We present a study of the key language concepts in Behavior Trees and their use in real-world robotic applications. We identify behavior tree languages and compare their semantics to the most well-known behavior modeling languages: state and activity diagrams. We mine open source repositories for robotics applications that use the language and analyze this usage. We find that Behavior Trees are a pragmatic language, not fully specified, allowing projects to extend it even for just one model. Behavior trees clearly resemble the models-at-runtime paradigm. We contribute a dataset of real-world behavior models, hoping to inspire the community to use and further develop this language, associated tools, and analysis techniques.

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Artifacts Functional

Strategic Tree Rewriting in Attribute Grammars
Lucas Kramer and Eric Van Wyk
(University of Minnesota, USA)
This paper presents strategy attributes, a seamless integration of strategic term rewriting into attribute grammars. Strategy attributes are specified using rewrite rules with strategies that control their application. The rules can reference contextual information held in attributes on the trees being rewritten. This use of attributes leads to rewriting on decorated trees instead of undecorated terms. During rewriting, attributes are (lazily) computed on new trees to ensure they are correct with respect to their defining equations. Attributes and strategic rewriting can each be used where most appropriate, thus avoiding the cumbersome aspects of each.
Strategy attributes are essentially higher-order attributes for which the defining equations are automatically generated from the attributes' strategy expressions. They are thus compatible with other attribute grammar features such as reference attributes, forwarding, and attribute flow analyses for well-definedness. A conservative static analysis checks if a strategy is intended to always succeed or to be partial, thus simplifying its use and optimizing its translation. Strategy attributes are demonstrated in the optimization of a simple expression language, evaluation of the lambda calculus, and optimization of strategy attribute translations.

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Artifacts Functional

A Semantic Framework for PEGs
Sérgio Queiroz de Medeiros and Carlos Olarte
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)
Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) are a recognition-based formalism which allows to describe the syntactical and the lexical elements of a language. The main difference between Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and PEGs relies on the interpretation of the choice operator: while the CFGs’ unordered choice e ∣ e′ is interpreted as the union of the languages recognized by e and e′, the PEGs’ prioritized choice e / e′ discards e′ if e succeeds. Such subtle, but important difference, changes the language recognized and yields more efficient parsing algorithms. This paper proposes a rewriting logic semantics for PEGs. We start with a rewrite theory giving meaning to the usual constructs in PEGs. Later, we show that cuts, a mechanism for controlling backtracks in PEGs, finds also a natural representation in our framework. We generalize such mechanism, allowing for both local and global cuts with a precise, unified and formal semantics. Hence, our work strives at better understanding and controlling backtracks in parsers for PEGs. The semantics we propose is executable and, besides being a parser with modest efficiency, it can be used as a playground to test different optimization ideas. More importantly, it is a mathematical tool that can be used for different analyses.

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Video

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Example-Driven Software Language Engineering
Mikhail Barash
(University of Bergen, Norway)
Language workbenches---tools to define software languages together with their IDEs---are designed to simplify language engineering and implementation: they free language engineers from many meticulous tasks, but oftentimes have a very steep learning curve even for experienced software professionals. With the assumption that meta-definitions are one of the key factors that hinder language engineering, we introduce an example-driven approach to language definition. We describe in this paper our vision of a web-based tool aimed at beginner language engineers, and list possible requirements for such a tool. A language is defined by giving examples of code written in it using illustrative syntax definition. These examples are then annotated to specify different concerns of language definition---abstract syntax, typing rules, validation rules, formatting rules, and dynamic semantics.

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Grammar-Based Testing for Little Languages: An Experience Report with Student Compilers
Phillip van Heerden, Moeketsi Raselimo, Konstantinos Sagonas, and Bernd Fischer
(Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Uppsala University, Sweden)
We report on our experience in using various grammar-based test suite generation methods to test 61 single-pass compilers that undergraduate students submitted for the practical project of a computer architecture course.
We show that (1) all test suites constructed systematically following different grammar coverage criteria fall far behind the instructor's test suite in achieved code coverage, in the number of triggered semantic errors, and in detected failures and crashes; (2) a medium-sized positive random test suite triggers more crashes than the instructor's test suite, but achieves lower code coverage and triggers fewer non-crashing errors; and (3) a combination of the systematic and random test suites performs as well or better than the instructor's test suite in all aspects and identifies errors or crashes in every single submission.
We then develop a light-weight extension of the basic grammar-based testing framework to capture contextual constraints, by encoding scoping and typing information as ``semantic mark-up tokens'' in the grammar rules. These mark-up tokens are interpreted by a small generic core engine when the tests are rendered, and tests with a syntactic structure that cannot be completed into a valid program by choosing appropriate identifiers are discarded. % We formalize individual error models by overwriting individual mark-up tokens, and generate tests that are guaranteed to break specific contextual properties of the language. We show that a fully automatically generated random test suite with 15 error models achieves roughly the same coverage as the instructor's test suite, and outperforms it in the number of triggered semantic errors and detected failures and crashes. Moreover, all failing tests indicate real errors, and we have detected errors even in the instructor's reference implementation.

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Modular and Distributed IDE
Fabien Coulon, Alex Auvolat, Benoit Combemale, Yérom-David Bromberg, François Taïani, Olivier Barais, and Noël Plouzeau
(Obeo, France; University of Rennes, France; Inria, France; CNRS, France; IRISA, France)
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are indispensable companions to programming languages. They are increasingly turning towards Web-based infrastructure. The rise of a protocol such as the Language Server Protocol (LSP) that standardizes the separation between a language-agnostic IDE, and a language server that provides all language services (e.g., auto completion, compiler...) has allowed the emergence of high quality generic Web components to build the IDE part that runs in the browser. However, all language services require different computing capacities and response times to guarantee a user-friendly experience within the IDE. The monolithic distribution of all language services prevents to leverage on the available execution platforms (e.g., local platform, application server, cloud). In contrast with the current approaches that provide IDEs in the form of a monolithic client-server architecture, we explore in this paper the modularization of all language services to support their individual deployment and dynamic adaptation within an IDE. We evaluate the performance impact of the distribution of the language services across the available execution platforms on four EMF-based languages, and demonstrate the benefit of a custom distribution.

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Block-Based Syntax from Context-Free Grammars
Mauricio Verano Merino and Tijs van der Storm
(Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands; CWI, Netherlands; University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Block-based programming systems employ a jigsaw metaphor to write programs. They are popular in the domain of programming education (e.g., Scratch), but also used as a programming interface for end-users in other disciplines, such as arts, robotics, and configuration management. In particular, block-based environments promise a convenient interface for Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) for domain experts who might lack a traditional programming education. However, building a block-based environment for a DSL from scratch requires significant effort.
This paper presents an approach to engineer block-based language interfaces by reusing existing language artifacts. We present Kogi, a tool for deriving block-based environments from context-free grammars. We identify and define the abstract structure for describing block-based environments. Kogi transforms a context-free grammar into this structure, which then generates a block-based environment based on Google Blockly. The approach is illustrated with four case studies, a DSL for state machines, Sonification Blocks (a DSL for sound synthesis), Pico (a simple programming language), and QL (a DSL for questionnaires). The results show that usable block-based environments can be derived from context-free grammars, and with an order of magnitude reduction in effort.

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Artifacts Functional

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