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Reviewer: Julia Anne Dain

The Synthesizer Generator is a software tool for the creation of language-specific editors, such as editors for programming languages, document preparation systems, and program verification tools. It uses the spreadsheet paradigm of immediate computation, in which any edit operation causes immediate error reporting, analysis, and translation of affected text. The specification language for the Synthesizer Generator is based on attribute grammars and allows the user to write modular specifications for abstract syntax, concrete input syntax, display format, context-sensitive relationships, and transformation rules. The synthesizer generator: a system for constructing language-based editors is an in-depth account of this system, including its design philosophy, a tutorial introduction, a more detailed treatment, several examples of its use, and technical material on its implementation; the authors also provide algorithms for incremental attribute evaluation. The book is well organized and well written. It sustains the reader's interest by careful presentation of topics and the use of illuminating examples, and it contains several pointers to other work in the area. Although the book is about a specific tool, it will interest anyone doing research or development on interactive programming environments, compilers and language translation systems, or software tools. The authors assume little background, but some familiarity with attribute grammars and language specifications would be helpful: even with this background, the reader has to assimilate a great deal of material. The tutorial introduction is essential for a prospective user of the Synthesizer Generator. The chapter on “Practical Advice” makes excellent reading for anyone designing an editor, whether he or she intends to build it by hand or to use either this particular system or any other editor-generator. The book may also be useful supplementary reading for an advanced course on compilers. This book is a very interesting account of a major piece of research in interactive programming environments. This research has developed into a powerful software tool for generating customized editors which is available commercially and for research. The authors intend the reference manual to be the defining document for the Synthesizer Generator; it contains the technical documentation for the user of the system. As a specification, it would also be of interest to anyone designing an editor-generator. It gives a shorter account than the other book and omits the tutorial material and the discussion of design philosophy and implementation technicalities.