Onward Most Notable Paper Award 2020 for Declarative Syntax Definition

08-Mar-2021

The Onward conference awarded the 2020 Most Notable Paper award to the paper

Lennart C. L. Kats, Eelco Visser, and Guido Wachsmuth. Pure and Declarative Syntax Definition: Paradise Lost and Regained. Onward! 2010 [doi](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1869459.1869535)

Citation: In a beautiful and compelling exposition, this essay lays out a research vision for realizing a declarative approach to syntax definition. Considering how we can best capture the syntactic structure of a programming language is a question near to the heart of both language design and implementation. The essay is technically interesting without getting lost in formality. Its argument for the declarative paradigm has been influential, impacting a chain of research on declarative syntax tools and helping to usher in the recent era of polyglot programming.