Creating Textual Language Dialects Using Aspect-like Techniques

Here we present a work aimed on efficiently creating textual language dialects and supporting tools for them (e.g. compiler front-ends, IDE support, pretty-printers, etc.). A dialect is a language which may be described with a (relatively small) set of changes to some other language (a parent language). For example we can consider SQL dialects used in DB-management systems. We propose to use aspects for grammars to define different features of the anguage and to transform grammars. A dialect is created by defining a syntactical spect which modifies the parent language. This technique is not dependent on any particular language design, AST structure or parsing technology and provides a uniform way for creating dialects, which extend or restrict languages.