The concept of context-free hypergraph grammars (cfhg grammars) has been stLdied extensively over the past decade. In this paper we introduce attributed context-free hypergraph grammars (acfhg grammars) as an extension of cfhg grammars. An acfhg grammar consists of an underlying context-free hypergraph grammar $G_0$ and an attribution which associates attributes with the nonterminal symbols of $G_0$ analogous to the classical attribute grammars (ags) by Knuth. We show that acfhg grammars and ags are closely related in such a way that an ag can be used to compute the attribute values of an acfhg grammar. Due to this relationship the known techniques for attribute evaluation for ags can be exploited for acfhg grammars. Also we show that attributed tree grammars can be embedded into the concept of acfhg grammars, provided an ap- propriate semantics is associated with the acfhg grammar. Finally, we show how an acfhg grammar can be used to associate semantics with programs of some programming language $P$ in such a way that non-context-free constraints of $P$ are already checked in the syntactical phase, i.e., by the underlying cfhg grammar.

Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics, Volume 3, Number 2, 1998, 105-147