The Foundation — Graph Grammars

Abstract

In the implementation of textual languages, formal grammars are commonly used to facilitate the language understanding and the parser creation. When implementing a diagrammatic visual programming language (in the rest of the chapter, diagrammatic visual programming languages will simply be referred to as visual languages), this is not usually the case. A visual language requires a formal syntactic definition, which is indispensable for automatic analysis, transformation, and non-ambiguous expression. Graph grammars with their well-established theoretical background may be used as a natural and powerful syntax-definition formalism (Rozenberg 1997) and the parsing algorithm based on a graph grammar may be used to check the syntactical correctness and to interpret the language semantics.