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Stratego/XT 0.12

Stratego -- Strategies for Program Transformation
Released October 04, 2004

Download

See the installation instructions if you are not familiar with the standard installation procedure of tarballs or RPMs.

Source tar.gz

Source RPM

Redhat Linux RPM

Redhat 8.0:

Redhat 9.0:

SuSE Linux RPM

SuSE 8.2:

Mac OS X binaries

Microsoft Windows Cygwin binaries

License

StrategoXT is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

Support

Despite the disclaimer above we do our best to help users of Stratego/XT. Subscribe to the Stratego mailing lists, in particular the stratego-announce and stratego mailing lists to get announcements of new releases and ask questions about usage of the languages and tools. Also we're interested to know what people are using Stratego/XT for and how it might be improved, so feel free to drop us a line.

Summary of Changes

Stratego Language

  • New `if then' construct

  • Bigger bag of dynamic rule applications

Stratego Library

  • Improved newname for repeated application.

  • New mathematical strategies: abs and gcd.

Tools

  • Various usability improvements in pack-sdf, a tool for collecting SDF modules in a single SDF definition.

  • Improved performance and error-reporting of format-check, a tool for checking the structure of an aterm,

  • New features and various usability enhancements in parse-unit, a tool for unit testing SDF syntax definitions.

  • The parenthesize generator, sdf2parenthesize, now fixes much more conflicts: transitive priorities are now supported.

  • Support for comment preserving transformations.

  • New XML tools provide pragmatic interoperability with XML tools.

Deployment

  • Improved Autoconf macros in AutoXT

Format Checking

The format-check tool has been reimplemented in order to boost performance, and improve error-reporting and visualization. The format checker now uses a bottom-up algorithm for format checking. The tool infers types in a bottom-up fashion and will complain at the innermost term for which no type can be inferred. If this term has subterms, then their inferred types will be shown. The performance is even better in --fast mode, but this might reduce the quality of the error reports.

Format-check now supports a --vis mode for showing format errors in a pretty-printed aterm at the command-line. Format-errors will be indicated in red if the terminal supports colors.

Format-check also has a new feature to report the results of type inference in an HTML document. This document contains the input term, formatted in the same way as pp-aterm. All innermost format errors in the aterm are indicated by red boxes. Moving over the aterm with your mouse will show the inferred types of the aterms in an information box.

More information, examples, and a screenshot are available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Pack SDF

Several features have been added to pack-sdf to make it more user-friendly:

  • pack-sdf now checks if the module name specified in an SDF module file, corresponds to the actual filename. Having different names can lead to very nasty problems.

  • The order of include path entries has been improved to make it more clear. The directory of the main module (specified with -i) is now the first include option. This is not always the current directory, in which case unexpected modules might be imported in previous versions of StrategoXT. So, pack-sdf -i syn/Foo.sdf will search for module in the syn directory.

  • The input file is no longer searched for in the include path. That is, pack-sdf -i Foo.sdf now always packs ./Foo.sdf, not a module Foo elsewhere in the include path if ./Foo.sdf does not exist.

  • A warning is printed if a specified include directory does not exist.

  • Improved error reporting for missing modules. Usually, the module is not really missing, but the name of this import is incorrect. Hence, it is useful to report the module(s) from where the 'missing' module is imported. Pack SDF now prints a detailed report of all missing modules and the module where these are imported.

  • pack-sdf now reports all missing modules in a single execution.

  • pack-sdf now (again) supports the creation of a dependency file suitable for inclusion in a Makefile. Makefile.xt will instruct pack-sdf to do this, so there is no longer a need to specify dependencies of SDF files.

More information on pack-sdf is available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Parse Unit

In previous releases of StrategoXT, parse-unit testsuites had to be parsed with a separate tool before passing it to parse-unit. This is obviously a bad idea, so parse-unit itself now parses the testsuite. It will fall back to abstract syntax, so this change should not break existing makefiles. The --abstract-input option can be used to declare that you are passing a testsuite in abstract syntax.

Parse-unit now has an option to parse a single test and write the result to the output. In this mode ambiguities are accepted, which is useful for debugging. The option for this 'single test mode' is --single <nr> where <nr> is the number in the testsuite (printed when the testsuite is executed). The --asfix2 flag can be used to produce asfix2 instead of an AST.

Parse-unit now accepts a --no-heuristic-filters flag to disable the heuristic -fi (injection count) and -fe (eagerness) disambiguation filters of sglr. Using this flag is highly encouraged.

More information and an example are available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Parenthesizer Generation

A major bug in in the generation of rewrite rules for chain priorities has been fixed in this release of StrategoXT. In the previous version, the tool assumed that the SDF normalizer generates chain priorities for the transitive closure of the priorities that are defined in an SDF syntax definition. However, this is not the case and therefore the parenthesize generator now applies the transitive closure itself.

Also, the determination of conflicting patterns in an AST has been separated from the parenthesize generator in the tool sdf2ast-conflicts. This tool might be useful for other applications.

More information and an example are available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed Martin Bravenboer)

Pragmatic XML Support

In StrategoXT 0.12 some new tools are available that makes interoperability with other programs and libraries that are based on XML seamless. The tools aterm2xml and xml2aterm support this conversion from aterm to XML and vice versa. Since applications have different needs, there are three conversion modes available: implicit, explicit, and very explicit. The default mode, explicit, support a round trip for most common aterms.

More explanation and examples are available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Support for Comment Preserving Transformations

asfix-anno-comments is a new asfix to asfix tool that preserves comments that were of the input source code by putting them in annotations of the AST.

Implode-asfix now supports preservation of annotations in AsFix? trees. This means that implode-asfix now supports the addPosInfo position annotation tool, and the just mentioned comment annotation tool.

An example is available at the Tools Wiki:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Language Enhancements

In StrategoXT 0.10 the bagof-R strategy was introduced. This strategy returns all applications of a dynamic rule. However, bagof-R only applies the dynamic rules that been defined in the innermost (most recent) scope where a rule R was defined. So, if dynamic rules with name A have been defined in several scopes, then not all applications are returned, but only the ones of defined in the innermost scope.

In this release there is bigger bagof: all-R. This strategy applies all the defined dynamic rules of name R.

(Contributed by Eelco Visser)

In StrategoXT 0.10 we added the if-then-else construct, which is basically just an alternative syntax for the guarded left choice (where(s1) < s2 + s3). Since we found ourselves writing a lot if s1 then s2 else id end, we have now also added an if-then construct. This new strategy if s1 then s2 end is equivalent to if s1 then s2 else id end.

More information is available at:

(Contributed by Martin Bravenboer)

Improved New Name

The library strategy newname (which is used for generating unique identifiers) now trims any trailing digits up to the rightmost '_'. Hence, repeated application of newname will no longer result in mutiple numeric postfixes (for example a_0_0).

For example: 

  <newname> "a"        // produces "a_0"
; <newname> "b"        // produces "b_0"
; <newname> "b_1"      // produces "b_2"
; <newname> "b_1729"   // produces "b_3"
; <newname> "b_a"      // produces "b_a_0"

(Contributed Arthur van Dam)

AutoXT

The Autconf support of AutoXT has been updated. Autoconf macros of autoxt.m4 now perform more checks. For example, Autoconf now fails if there are undefined macros with the XT prefix. Furthermore, autoxt.m4 now defines a macro XT_ARG_WITH for concisely adding --with-PACKAGE arguments to configure scripts in your own packages.

If you are developing packages based on StrategoXT and AutoXT, then you must have Autoconf 2.58 or newer. This does not affect users: the installation of a StrategoXT distribution doesn't require Autoconf.

(Contributed by Akim Demaille)

Detailed List of Issues

The full list of issues closed in this release is available at:

Download and Installation

The release page contains the source distributions, binary RPMs, and detailed instructions on how to install the distributions:

Bugs and Known Problems

See our issue tracking systems for reports about (open) bugs:

Please report any problems with installation or bugs in the implementation to our issue tracking system. Please check the existing issues to see if a report about the problem was already submitted.

Contributions

Developments, beta tests, and bug fixes were carried out by

  • Martin Bravenboer
  • Arthur van Dam
  • Akim Demaille
  • Rob Vermaas
  • Eelco Visser