Creating, editing, and manipulating instances of a grammar is the task of grammar instantiation. Grammar instantiation has received much attention with software systems such as programming environments and compound-document environments. Content investigation and grammar development have only recently been recognized as recurring complex tasks. They have received little attention because of their newly emerging significance. This work focuses on grammar development.
Auxiliary information describes the application of the grammar description.
A review of existing software systems reveals that a new, general-purpose, support environment was required for developing grammar descriptions. A prototype environment for developing grammar descriptions, DeveGram, has been designed and implemented. DeveGram controls and manages the four problem classes by capturing any context-free grammar, providing mechanisms for determining properties about a grammar, capturing auxiliary information, and generating automatically grammar descriptions in a testbed of different notations. DeveGram produces grammar descriptions for a testbed of software systems differing in syntax and purpose.