Program Transformation
Visser
Program transformation has applications in many areas of software engineering including compilation, optimization, refactoring, program synthesis, software renovation, and reverse engineering. The aim of program transformation is to increase programmer productivity by automating programming tasks, thus enabling programming at a higher-level of abstraction, and increasing maintainability and re-usability.
Many systems for program transformation exist that are often
specialized for a specific object language and/or kind of
transformation. All these systems share many ideas about
program transformation and use similar techniques, but are
often ad-hoc in many respects. The goal of my research is
to achieve a specification language or family of
specification languages for the high-level, declarative
specification of program transformation systems in which
generic, language independent schemas of transformation can
be captured, and which admits efficient implementation of
those transformations that can scale up to large programs.
Tools
This research is guided by the design and implementation of tools for aspects of the transformation process- Stratego? : term rewriting and rewriting strategies
- Syntax definition: declarative specification of syntax of languages
- XT: bundling of transformation tools