A personal retrospective on language workbenches

Model-driven software engineering and specifically domain-specific languages have contributed to improve the quality of software and the efficiency in the development of software. However, the design and implementation of domain-specific languages requires still an enormous investment. Language workbenches are the most important tools in the field of software language engineering. The introduction of language workbenches has alleviated partly the development effort, but there are still a few major challenges that need to be tackled. This paper presents a personal perspective on the development of tools for language engineering and language workbenches in particular and future challenges to be tackled.</p

Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)

This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.Comment: Extended version (14 pages total) of the paper Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis. This Technical Report version includes the guarantee proofs for the proposed discovery algorithm

Extracting mathematical semantics from LaTeX documents

We report on a project to use SGLR parsing and term rewriting with ELAN4 to extract the semantics of mathematical formulas from a LaTeX document and representing them in MathML. The LaTeX document we used is part of the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF) project of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and obeys project-specific conventions, which contains macros for mathematical constructions, among them 200 predefined macros for special functions, the subject matter of the project. The SGLR parser can parse general context-free languages, which suffices to extract the structure of mathematical formulas from calculus that are written in the usual mathematical style, with most parentheses and multiplication signs omitted. The parse tree is then rewritten into a more concise and uniform internal syntax that is used as the base for extracting MathML or other semantical information

Development of parsing tools for Casl using generic language technology

An environment for the Common Algebraic Specification Language CASL consists of independent tools. A number of CASL have been built using the algebraic formalism ASF+SDF and the+SDF Meta-Environment. CASL supports-defined syntax which is non-trivial to: ASF+SDF offers a powerful parsing(Generalized LR). Its interactive environment facilitates rapid complemented by early detection correction of errors. A number of core developed for the ASF+SDF-Environment can be reused in the context CASL. Furthermore, an instantiation of a format developed for the representation ASF+SDF specifications and terms provides a-specific exchange format

Extracting mathematical semantics from LaTeX documents

We report on a project to use SGLR parsing and term rewriting with ELAN4 to extract the semantics of mathematical formulas from a LaTeX document and representing them in MathML. The LaTeX document we used is part of the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF) project of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and obeys project-specific conventions, which contains macros for mathematical constructions, among them 200 predefined macros for special functions, the subject matter of the project. The SGLR parser can parse general context-free languages, which suffices to extract the structure of mathematical formulas from calculus that are written in the usual mathematical style, with most parentheses and multiplication signs omitted. The parse tree is then rewritten into a more concise and uniform internal syntax that is used as the base for extracting MathML or other semantical information

Modular grammar specification

We establish a semantics for building grammars from a modularised specification in which modules are able to delete productions from imported nonterminals. Modules have import lists of nonterminals; some or all of an imported nonterminal's productions may be suppressed at import time. There are two basic import mechanisms which (a) reference or (b) clone an imported nonterminal's productions. One of our goals is to allow a precise answer to the question: ‘what character level language does this grammar generate’ in the face of difficult issues such as the mutual embedding of languages that have different whitespace and commenting conventions. Our technique is to automatically generate a character level grammar from grammars written at token level in the conventional way; the grammar is constructed from modules each of which may have its own whitespace convention. Keywords: Context free grammar; Modularity; Whitespace processin

SAMOS - A framework for model analytics and management

The increased popularity and adoption of model-* engineering paradigms, such as model-driven and model-based engineering, leads to an increase in the number of models, metamodels, model transformations and other related artifacts. This calls for automated techniques to analyze large collections of those artifacts to manage model-* ecosystems. SAMOS is a framework to address this challenge: it treats model-* artifacts as data, and applies various techniques—ranging from information retrieval to machine learning—to analyze those artifacts in a holistic, scalable and efficient way. Such analyses can help to understand and manage those ecosystems

DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors (jigsaw-like puzzles) to display valid combinations of language constructs to the users. Part of the current popularity of block-based environments is thanks to Scratch. As a result they are often associated with tools for children or young learners. However, it is unclear how these types of programming environments are developed and used in general. So we conducted a systematic literature review on block-based environments by studying 152 papers published between 2014 and 2020, and a non-systematic tool review of 32 block-based environments. In particular, we provide a helpful inventory of block-based editors for end-users on different topics and domains. Likewise, we focused on identifying the main components of block-based environments, how they are engineered, and how they are used. This survey should be equally helpful for language engineering researchers and language engineers alike

Pretty-printing within the ASF+SDF meta-environment : a generic approach

The automatic generation of formatters for (programming) languages within the Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment is a research topic that is concerned with the construction of language specific formatters (or pretty-printers) given a language definition in Sdf. In this paper, we give an overview of pretty-printers that have been developed within this project and observe that these pretty-printers are either language dependent or non-customizable. Language independence and customizability are inevitable properties of pretty-printers however, when faced with the problem of formatting many different, evolving languages. Therefore, we introduce in this paper a generic framework for pretty-printing and describe an instantiation of the framework that forms a language independent and customizable pretty-printer

Environments for term rewriting engines for free!

Term rewriting can only be applied if practical implementations of term rewriting engines exist. New rewriting engines are designed and implemented either to experiment with new (theoretical) results or to be able to tackle new application areas. In this paper we present the Meta-Environment: an environment for rapidly implementing the syntax and semantics of term rewriting based formalisms. We provide not only the basic building blocks, but complete interactive programming environments that only need to be instantiated by the details of a new formalism