article

Maya: multiple-dispatch syntax extension in Java

Authors:

Wilson C. HsiehAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 37, Issue 5

Pages 270 - 281

https://doi.org/10.1145/543552.512562

Published: 17 May 2002 Publication History

Abstract

We have designed and implemented Maya, a version of Java that allows programmers to extend and reinterpret its syntax. Maya generalizes macro systems by treating grammar productions as generic functions, and semantic actions on productions as multimethods on the corresponding generic functions. Programmers can write new generic functions (i.e., grammar productions) and new multimethods (i.e., semantic actions), through which they can extend the grammar of the language and change the semantics of its syntactic constructs, respectively. Maya's multimethods are compile-time metaprograms that transform abstract syntax: they execute at program compile-time, because they are semantic actions executed by the parser. Maya's multimethods can be dispatched on the syntactic structure of the input, as well as the static, source-level types of expressions in the input. In this paper we describe what Maya can do and how it works. We describe how its novel parsing techniques work and how Maya can statically detect certain kinds of errors, such as code that generates references to free variables. Finally, to demonstrate Maya's expressiveness, we describe how Maya can be used to implement the MultiJava language, which was described by Clifton et al. at OOPSLA 2000.

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Index Terms

Maya: multiple-dispatch syntax extension in Java
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 37, Issue 5

May 2002

326 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/543552

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '02: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 conference on Programming language design and implementation
June 2002
338 pages
ISBN:1581134630
DOI:10.1145/512529
General Chair:
Jens Knoop
Universität Dortmund, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Laurie J. Hendren
McGill University, Canada

Copyright © 2002 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 17 May 2002

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 37, Issue 5

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622788
Haria SHill MSwift M(2018)Devirtualizing Memory in Heterogeneous SystemsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296957.317319453:2(637-650)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296957.3173194
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296957.3173188
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