INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DEVELOPING APPLICATION-INDEPENDENT LANGUAGE MODULES FOR LANGUAGE-INDEPENDENT APPLICATIONS

摘要

An application-independent language module for language-independentapplications responds to a request from an applicationidentifying a concept that is generic to a plurality of languages and thelanguage that the concept is to be expressed in, by generating andreturning an expression of the identified concept in the identified languagefor the application to communicate. The language module is implementedin object-orientated programming form and includes instances of thefollowing foundation class objects that are provided by an infrastructurefor language module development: a concept object for defining thegeneric concepts in a language-independent manner and pointing toconcept definitions each defining the corresponding concept in a differentlanguage, a concept definition object for defining the concepts inlanguage-dependent manner and pointing to parsers each for expressinga part of an expression of the concept in the language of the conceptdefinition and associating any variables that are involved in the conceptwith parsers, and a parser object for expressing parts of the conceptexpressions and values of any associated variables in the languages ofthe concept definitions. Variables are defined at the concept level. Alsoincluded are foundation classes for languages, variables, and data types.The development infrastructure further includes an application programinterface (API) for creating, modifying, and deleting class instances in adatabase compilable into the language module repository, and a databaseof media fragments for forming communicable versions of the concepts.