A Concrete Syntax Transformation Approach for Software Language Processing

In this paper we present an approach for software language processing tasks such as code generation, reverse-engineering and refactoring, based upon text-to-text (T2T) transformations expressed using the concrete syntax of the source and target software languages. The goal of the approach is to provide simpler and more usable techniques for specifying such tasks, compared to model-to-model (M2M) or model-to-text (M2T) transformation approaches. We evaluate the approach on language processing tasks of domain-specific language (DSL) tool support, software abstraction, model transformation, reverse engineering and program translation, and show that it can be effective for these tasks.