VisualLISA: Visual programming environment for attribute grammars specification

The benefits of using visual languages and graphical editors are well known. In some specific domain it is really crucial to program with graphical representations, icons, geometric objects, colors and so on. Nowadays it is possible to easily implement a visual language, constructing, automatically, visual editors for it. In this paper we want to emphasize how it is possible to easily specify a huge amount of complex information, associated with an attribute grammar, using graphical objects and a very intuitive modular approach. For that purpose we present a new visual language to specify attribute grammars (called VisualLISA) and we present also a modular approach that uses VisualLISA in an integrated editor to draw attribute grammars.