GF Eclipse Plugin

Motivation

To complement the web-based IDE and provide more advanced development features, targeted at power users who manage larger grammar projects in a desktop setting.

Features

The intended features of the plugin (in rough order of priority):

Short-term

1. Syntax highlighting and error detection
2. Code folding, auto commenting
3. Definition outlining, with types
4. Auto-completion
5. Support for GF's module system
   • Ensure module name matches file name
   • Support for inheritance, selective inheritace, opening, qualified names
   • Warning when using a definition (e.g. function, parameter etc.) not in inheritance tree
   • Detection of duplicate names through inheritance
6. Support for abstract/concrete instantiation
   • Warnings for concrete syntax completeness and well-typedness
7. Support for functor use
8. Source code templates
9. Auto-creation of new concrete syntaxes from abstracts

Longer-term

1. In-built browser for the GF resource grammar library, i.e. a dynamic replacement for the HTML RGL synopsis
2. Run configurations
   • e.g. hitting F5 will load GF, import your grammar, run custom commands
3. Test-suite functionality
   • Treebank management and testing
   • Possibility to incorporate treebank tool demonstrated by Jordi Saludes in the Math Grammar Library

Format

The intention is for the plugin to be packaged as a regular Eclipse extension which can be installed and updated via the standard Eclipse plugin system.

Once installed the plugin will provide a new "GF" interface to the development environment.

Technical information

• This plugin is being built using the Xtext DSL framework.
• SVN repository can be found at svn://molto-project.eu/eclipse/plugin