The Metal environment, in addition to pretty printing the Metal
program, consists of an additional pulldown named whose
buttons allow us to type check, compile, and navigate through Metal
programs.
You must first type check a Metal program for errors (since the compiler fails if the program contains any errors). If there are any errors or warnings, a special message window will open. You may click on any differently colored message text to see a corresponding position in the source.
To generate the tables for Exp, click on the button of this menu. To compile both the abstract and
concrete syntax parts of the program, click on the
button. This compilation does not create the final parser, which we
discuss below.