Eelco and I have a second paper at the LDTA workshop this year -- a tool description paper about Spoofax. The paper is very space-constrained, so we dropped the abstract, but if we had one, it would read like this:

Many programmable software transformation systems are based around novel domain-specific languages, with a long history of development and successful deployment. Despite their reasonable maturity and applicability, these systems are often discarded as esoteric research prototypes partly because the languages are frequently based on less familiar programming paradigms such as term and graph rewriting or logic programming, and partly because modern development environments are rarely found for these systems. The basic and expected interactive development aids such as source code navigation, searching, content completion, real-time syntax highlighting and error checking, are rarely available to developers of transformation code.

In this system description paper, we introduce Spoofax, an interactive development environment based on Eclipse for developing program analyses and transformations with Stratego/XT -- a language and toolset for developing stand-alone software transformation systems based on formal language descriptions. Spoofax provides the aids mentioned above, in addition to a code outliner and incremental building of projects, and thus significantly eases the development of language processing tools using Stratego/XT. Furthermore, Spoofax is extensible with scripts written in Stratego that are executed within Eclipse, and allow live analyses and transformations of the code under development.

(pdf, bib)

There is already a website for Spoofax, www.spoofax.org, but it's hardly inviting and informative. I have a new one in SVN, but as always, I tend to spend my time hacking code instead of making releases and web pages. I'll try to remedy that very soon.

Together with Eelco Visser, I got a paper (two actually, see the other post) accepted to this year's Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications, which is held in Braga Portugal. My visit to IBM Research last summer started me thinking about a good way to integrate existing compiler frontends with Stratego/XT. This is the result, and I think it turned out quite well.

Transformation systems such as Stratego/XT provide powerful analysis and transformation frameworks and concise languages for language processing, but instantiating them for every subject language is an arduous task, most often resulting in half-completed frontends. Open compilers, like the Eclipse Compiler for Java, provide mature frontends with robust parsers and type checkers, but solving language processing problems in general purpose languages without transformation libraries is tedious. Reusing these frontends with existing transformation systems is therefore attractive. However, for this reuse to be optimal, the functional logic found in the frontend should be exposed to the transformation system -- simple data serialization of the abstract syntax tree is not enough, as this fails to expose important compiler functionality, such as import graphs, symbol tables and the type checker.

In this paper, we introduce a scriptable analysis and transformation framework for Java built on top of the Eclipse Java compiler. The framework consists of an adapter extracted from the abstract syntax tree of the compiler, and an interpreter for the Stratego language. The adapter allows the Stratego interpreter to rewrite directly on the compiler AST. We illustrate the applicability of our system with scripts written in Stratego that perform framework and library-specific analyses and transformations.

(pdf, bib)

The prototype code is already available in the Spoofax SVN repo, but I will clean it up and make a separate release once I get a bit of breathing space from my thesis writing.

Anya, Valentin, Magne and myself recently wrote a paper that was presented at GPCE this year. Valentin and me implemented the extension using the Transformers transformation system (Valentin did most of the hacking for C -- I was hacking for TIL. More on that later). We designed the extension to capture most of Magne's original idea into the result. Anya helped out with the writing and finding illustrative examples.

Abstract

Dealing with failure and exceptional situations is an important but tricky part of programming, especially when reusing existing components. Traditionally, it has been up to the designer of a library to decide whether to use a language's exception mechanism, return values, or other ways to indicate exceptional circumstances. The library user has been bound by this choice, even though it may be inconvenient for a particular use. Furthermore, normal program code is often cluttered with code dealing with exceptional circumstances.

This paper introduces an alert concept which gives a uniform interface to all failure mechanisms. It separates the handling of an exceptional situation from reporting it, and allows for retro-fitting this for existing libraries. For instance, we may easily declare the error codes of the POSIX C library for file handling, and then use the library functions as if C had been extended with an exception mechanism for these functions -- a moulding of failure handling to the user's needs, independently of the library designer's choices.

(pdf, bib)

The code for this experiment will be released shortly, once Anya finishes the final set of examples that we will bundle with the release. She's been a bit under the weather lately, but hopefully she'll shake it off pretty soon. I will post about the release when it happens.

Eelco Visser and myself have a paper at the sixth international Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming (WRS'06), coming up next week.

Abstract

Some transformations and many analyses on programs are either difficult or unnatural to express using terms. In particular, analyses that involve type contexts, call- or control flow graphs are not easily captured in term rewriting systems. In this paper, we describe an extension to the System S term rewriting system that adds references. We show how references are used for graph rewriting, how we can express more transformations with graph-like structures using only local matching, and how references give a representation that is more natural for structures that are inherently graph-like. Furthermore, we discuss trade-offs of this extension, such as changed traversal termination and unexpected impact of reference rebinding.

bib - pdf

The final version of the article Stratego: A Programming Language for Program Manipulation is now online on the ACM Crossroads site. It is a very lightweight introduction to program transformation, why we do it, and how it works.

Abstract

Programming languages have a dual role in the construction of software. The language is both our substrate (the stuff we make software from), and our tool (what we use to construct software). Program transformation (PT) deals with the analysis, manipulation and generation of software. Therefore a close relationship exists between program transformation and programming languages, to the point where the PT field has produced many domain-specific languages for manipulating programs. In this article, I will show you some interesting aspects from one of these languages : Stratego.

The final version of the paper Stratego/XT 0.16: Components for Program Transformation Systems, written by Martin, Rob, Eelco and myself is now available.

Abstract

Stratego/XT is a language and toolset for program transformation. The Stratego language provides rewrite rules for expressing basic transformations, programmable rewriting strategies for controlling the application of rules, concrete syntax for expressing the patterns of rules in the syntax of the object language, and dynamic rewrite rules for expressing context-sensitive transformations, thus supporting the development of transformation components at a high level of abstraction. The XT toolset offers a collection of flexible, reusable transformation components, as well as declarative languages for deriving new components. Complete program transformation systems are composed from these components. In this paper we give an overview of Stratego/XT 0.16.

As promised, the preliminary draft of the paper Combining Aspect-Oriented and Strategic Programming by myself and Eelco Visser is now available.

Abstract

Properties such as logging, persistence, debugging, tracing, distribution, performance monitoring and exception handling occur in most programming paradigms and are normally very difficult or even impossible to modularize with traditional modularization mechanisms because they are cross-cutting. Recently, aspect-oriented programming has enjoyed recognition as a practical solution for separating these concerns. In this paper we describe an extension to the Stratego term rewriting language for capturing such properties. We show our aspect language offers a concise, practical and adaptable solution for dealing with unanticipated algorithm extension for forward data-flow propagation and dynamic type checking of terms. We briefly discuss some of the challenges faced when designing and implementing an aspect extension for and in a rule-based term rewriting system.

As an intended side-effect, the conference will be held in Nara, Japan. I've never been to Asia before as the travel expenses have typically been outside of my meager budget, so I'm naturally pretty excited. Getting decent airfare matching the dates of the conference turned out to be impossible, so I had to stay for two days longer than strictly necessary (with the added hotel costs, I still save ~500EUR). What a pity:) I also had the pleasure of meeting some Japanese natives in my kitchen last night, who shared some local knowledge and recommendations for sights to see and things to do. (When I came home at around 22:30, I had to wade through a 20+ people kitchen party equipped with DJ, mixer board, boom box and an ample supply of beverage, just to deposit my sweaty Gouda in the fridge).