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Presenter: Dr. James R. Cordy - Professor of Computing & Information Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Supervisor:

Date: Mon, May 6, 2002
Time: 10:30:00 - 11:30:00
Place: Clearihue Building (CLE), Room C112

ABSTRACT

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 re-engineering 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. In this talk we 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.

Jim Cordy is Professor of Computing & Information Science and of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. From 1995 to 2000 he was vice president and chief research scientist at Legasys Corporation, a software technology company specializing in legacy software system analysis and renovation. Prof. Cordy is the author or co-author of numerous contributions in computer software systems, including the PL/I subset compiler SP/k (1977), the Toronto Euclid compiler (1980), the S/SL compiler technology (1980), the Concurrent Euclid programming language (1981), the Turing programming language (1983), Turing Plus (1985), Object-Oriented Turing (1992), the orthogonal code generation compiler technology (1986), the TXL programming language (1991), the TXL source transformation system (1995), the LS/2000 year 2000 conversion system (1996), and the LS/AMT software analysis and migration system (1999). Most recently Prof. Cordy has been interested in the exploration of rule-based source transformation as a paradigm for the rapid solution of complex computing problems, ranging from design recovery and platform migration (in software engineering) to the automated understanding of hand-written mathematics (in artificial intelligence).