Stratego User Days 2005

2 - 4. of May, the Sixth Stratego User Days were held at Utrecht University. This year, attendees came from The Netherlands, Norway, UK, France and Russia, all presenting their neat projects based on Stratego.

The first day was basically a tutorial on Stratego, for newcomers. I didn't attend. The second day started off with Martin presenting the state of Stratego/XT. He gave a pretty decent overview of where we are, and where we are headed.

The other presentations that I found in particular interesting that day was the series of talks held by the EPITA people. Very inspiring. Especially their work on the C++ frontend (Transformers) is of relevance to us, since we're in need of a new C++ frontend to plug into CodeBoost. Transformers is based on SGLR with a highly ambiguous SDF grammar. The resulting parse is disambiguated using a basic attribute grammar system written in Stratego. The grammar definition is annotated with the disambiguating attribute programs.

They had also come up with a sort of AST conversion scheme, and made a converter from their AST (which is pretty tied to the C++ grammar) into the CodeBoost AST (which is a lot more high level). This will save us from a lot of work if (when?) we move over to their frontend.

The final day, the EPITA people presented detection of code smells and how it can work as a guide for (semi-)automatic refactoring. This is also something I find to be highly interesting, but I can't say I have the time to investigate this in detail at the present time.

As for myself, I was fortunate enough to have material for three presentations this year. The first one was Combining Aspect-Oriented and Strategic Programming, which was basically a rerun of my presentation in Japan. The second was a crackpot idea we've been exploring a bit the last few months, that we call Clone, Adapt and Improve. The presentation by itself doesn't make much sense without the accompanying paper, which is still under revision. The final presentation was Spoofax: A Stratego Editor -- a brief overview of the current state of the Spoofax Editor.

The wiki page for SUD'05 contains (will contain) all the presentations