A debugging tool for Autumn's context-sensitive grammars

In grammar development, like any other project, the debugging process is a crucial part of its lifetime. Unfortunately, general purpose debuggers cannot provide the level of abstraction needed to reason efficiently on grammar development related errors. Concepts like input stream manipulation or production rule being unknown to it result in difficulties to track whether mistakes comes from the input or the grammar itself. We introduce a debugging tool for Autumn context-sensitive grammar. The goal is to provide the developers with a tool that expose high-level abstractions that represent the structure he reason about more closely, allowing him to track errors and resolve them more easily. To achieve this, we developed an IntelliJ plugin that exposes the underlying structure of the grammar in a tree fashion and allows to observe the state of the parse during the invocation of any specific parser.