Software engineering by source transformation - experience with TXL

Author

Cordy, James R. ; Dean, Thomas R. ; Malton, Andrew J. ; Schneider, Kevin A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Queen´´s Univ., Kingston, Ont., Canada

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

168

Lastpage

178

Abstract

Many tasks in software engineering can be characterized as source to source transformations. Design recovery, software restructuring, forward engineering, language translation, platform migration and code reuse can all be understood as transformations from one source text to another. TXL, the Tree Transformation Language, is a programming language specifically designed to support rule-based source to source transformation. Originally conceived as a tool for exploring programming language dialects, TXL has evolved into a general purpose software transformation system that has proven well suited to a wide range of software maintenance and reengineering tasks, including the design recovery, analysis and automated reprogramming of billions of lines of commercial Cobol, PL/I and RPG code for the Year 2000. The authors introduce the basic features of modern TXL and its use in a range of software engineering applications, with an emphasis on how each task can be achieved by source transformation

Keywords

grammars; high level languages; program compilers; program interpreters; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software reusability; system recovery; systems re-engineering; PL/I; RPG code; TXL; Tree Transformation Language; automated reprogramming; code reuse; commercial Cobol; design recovery; forward engineering; language translation; platform migration; programming language dialects; rule-based source to source transformation; software engineering applications; software maintenance; software reengineering tasks; software restructuring; software transformation system; source transformation; Computer science; Councils; Electronic switching systems; Information science; Optimized production technology; Pattern matching;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, 2001. Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Florence

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1387-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SCAM.2001.972678

Filename

972678