Specification and Construction of Control Flow Semantics : a generic approach using graph transformations

In this thesis we introduce a control flow specification language (CFSL) with which a language designer can specify the control flow semantics of all constructs that are featured in the programming language he or she designs. A control flow specification in CFSL consists of a set of specification graphs that adhere to the CFSL meta-model. We also presents a structured, rule-based approach for constructing a flow graph (FG) for a program written in a particular programming language. In this approach, we use graph transformations to transform an abstract syntax graph representation (ASG) of the program into a FG. Such a graph transformation system consists of a set of programming language specific FG construction rules. Transformations between the two models are performed by another set of graph production rules: the FG meta-rules. These meta-rules generate the FG construction rules for a programming language from a control flow specification of that language in CFSL, thereby eliminating the need for hand designing the FG construction rules.