Reference. Syntactic Completions with Material Obligations

Code editors provide essential services that help developers understand, navigate, and modify programs. However, these services often fail in the presence of syntax errors. Existing syntax error recovery techniques, like panic mode and multi-option repairs, are either too coarse, e.g. in deleting large swathes of code, or lead to a proliferation of possible completions. This paper introduces tall tylr , an error-handling parser and editor generator that completes malformed code with syntactic obligations that abstract over many possible completions. These obligations generalize the familiar notion of holes in structure editors to cover missing operands, operators, delimiters, and sort transitions. tall tylr is backed by a novel theory of tile-based parsing, conceptually organized around a molder that turns tokens into tiles and a melder that completes and parses tiles into terms using an error-handling generalization of operator-precedence parsing. We formalize melding as a parsing calculus, meldr, that completes input tiles with additional obligations such that it can be parsed into a well-formed term, with success guaranteed over all inputs. We further describe how tall tylr implements molding and completionranking using the principle of minimizing obligations . Obligations offer a useful way to scaffold internal program representations, but in tall tylr we go further to investigate the potential of materializing these obligations visually to the programmer. We conduct a user study to evaluate the extent to which an editor like tall tylr that materializes syntactic obligations might be usable and useful, finding both points of positivity and interesting new avenues for future work.

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Cite as @moon-2025-syntactic (helia, typst) · \cite{moon-2025-syntactic} (LaTeX)
BibTeX
bibtex · 1 line
@article{moon-2025-syntactic, title={Syntactic Completions with Material Obligations}, volume={9}, ISSN={2475-1421}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3763182}, DOI={10.1145/3763182}, number={OOPSLA2}, journal={Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages}, publisher={Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)}, author={Moon, David and Blinn, Andrew and Porter, Thomas J. and Omar, Cyrus}, year={2025}, month=Oct, pages={3669–3695} }
hayagriva YAML (typst)
yaml · 20 lines
moon-2025-syntactic:
  type: article
  title: Syntactic Completions with Material Obligations
  author:
  - Moon, David
  - Blinn, Andrew
  - Porter, Thomas J.
  - Omar, Cyrus
  date: 2025-10
  page-range: 3669-3695
  url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3763182
  serial-number:
    doi: 10.1145/3763182
    issn: 2475-1421
  parent:
    type: periodical
    title: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
    publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
    issue: OOPSLA2
    volume: 9
Cites 28 works (2 here)
With notes (2)

Gradual Structure Editing with Obligations moon-2023-gradual

DOI

Hazelnut: a bidirectionally typed structure editor calculus omar-2017-hazelnut

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moon-2025-syntactic reference entries/refs/moon-2025-syntactic/moon-2025-syntactic.hel