A.T. Kooiker

A language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting

Automated formatting is an important technique for the software maintainer. It is either applied separately to improve the readability of source code, or as part of a source code transformation tool chain. In this paper we report on the application of generic tools for constructing formatters. In an industrial setting, automated formatters need to be tailored to the requirements of the customer. The (legacy) programming language or dialect and the corporate formatting conventions are specific and non-negotiable. Can generic formatting tools deal with such unexpected requirements? Driven by an industrial case of nearly 80 thousand lines of COBOL code, several limitations in existing formatting technology have been addressed. We improved its flexibility by replacing a generative phase by a generic tool, and we added a little expressiveness to the formatting back end. Most importantly, we employed a multi-stage formatting framework that can cope with any kind of formatting convention using more computational power

A language development environment for Eclipse

The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment provides a collection of tools for the generation of programming environments. We show how Eclipse can be extended with these generic language tools. By integrating the GUI and text editor of the Meta-Environment with Eclipse using TOOLBUS technology, we demonstrate the integration of third party, non-Java, software in Eclipse. By doing so, we create an experimentation framework for further programming language research. We describe our experiences and sketch future work.

An architecture for context-sensitive formatting

We have taken a fixed set of formatting requirements for a Cobol system as spelled out in a standardization document, and applied generic formatting technology to implement them. It appeared that corporate conventions can dictate alignment that crosscuts the logical structure of a program, and can even dictate indentation that is dynamically computed from context information. We have developed and implemented a formatting architecture that allows arbitrary computational power for mapping language constructs to the Box language. The enabling feature is a hybrid format that merges Box expressions with parse trees. Much of the boilerplate part of formatting can still be automated by a default mapping to Box. Absolute tab stops, an important feature which is not found in many Box back-ends, is used extensively in our case study.