Micropatterns in Grammars

Micropatterns and nanopatterns have been previously demonstrated to be useful techniques for object-oriented program comprehension. In this paper, we use a similar approach for identifying structurally similar fragments in grammars in a broad sense (contracts for commitment to structure), in particular parser specifications, metamodels and data models. Grammatical micropatterns bridge the gap between grammar metrics, which are easy to implement but hard to assign meaning to, and language design guidelines, which are inherently meaningful as stemming from current software language engineering practice but considerably harder to formalise.