| Summary: | A project report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Science in Engineering. === Program Description Language (PDL) is a high-level design
language used for both hardware and software systems design. Due
to the clerical effort involved in creating such a structured
program, however, the PDL design is usually bypassed, and coding
performed directly. The syntax-directed PDL generator package
presented here, written in Pascal for the IBM-PC, is aimed at
providing a tool for producing syntactically correct PDL programs
with the minimum of effort. Function keys are used extensively
for specifying system inputs, and PDL keywords are inserted via
construct templates. Syntactical correctness is always enforced
while indentation or prettypriuting is automatic. This userfriendly
PDL editor thus encourages a top-down iterative design
approach while automatically performing syntax and partial
semantic error detection. It is believed that this much needed
tool will not only promote high-level design principles, but also
serve as the basis for automatic code generation for commonly
used programming languages.
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