gel-generic-language

Jose Falcon , William R. Cook Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Austin Abstract Both XML and Lisp have demonstrated the utility of generic syntax for expressing tree-structured data. But generic languages do not provide the syntactic richness of custom languages. Generic Extensible Language (Gel) is a rich generic syntax that embodies many of the common syntactic conventions for operators, grouping and lists in widely-used languages. Prefix/infix operators are disambiguated by white-space, so that documents which violate common white-space conventions will not necessarily parse correctly with Gel. With some character replacements and adjusting for mismatch in operator precedence, Gel can extract meaningful structure from typical files in many languages, including Java, CSS, Smalltalk, and ANTLR grammars. This evaluation