Replacing phrase structure grammar with dependency grammar in the design and implementation of programming languages.

For decades, the design and implementation of programming languages has been based on phrase structure grammars, which divide a program recursively into phrases (represented by nonterminals), leaving the words of the program (the terminals) as the atoms of this division. By contrast, dependency grammar suggests that dependency between words, not constituency between phrases, is the primary grammatical relationship, and that a grammar capturing this relationship is basically a lexicon. In this paper, I suggest the use of dependency grammar for the design and implementation of programming languages. This allows me to unify the dictionaries populated by programs (with variables, procedures, functions, etc.) written in a programming language with the grammar of this language. I call the compilation of a programming language and its programs into a lexicon a langram and, using the example of the while language, show how langrams serve the "growing of languages".