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International Conference on Theory and Practice of Model Transformations

ICMT 2016: Theory and Practice of Model Transformations pp 3–18Cite as

A Domain Specific Transformation Language to Bridge Concrete and Abstract Syntax

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9765))

Abstract

Existing language workbenches, such as Xtext, support bridging the gap between the concrete syntax (CS) and abstract syntax (AS) of textual languages. However, the specification artefacts – i.e. grammars – are not sufficiently expressive to completely model the required CS-to-AS mapping, when it requires complex name resolution or multi-way mappings. This paper proposes a new declarative domain specific transformation language (DSTL) which provides support for complex CS-to-AS mappings, including features for name resolution and CS disambiguation. We justify the value of and need for a DSTL, analyse the challenges for using it to support mappings for complex languages such as Object Constraint Language, and demonstrate how it addresses these challenges. We present a comparison between the new DSTL and the state-of-the-art Gra2Mol, including performance data showing a significant improvement in terms of execution time.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/adolfosbh/cs2as.

  2. 2.

    Implementation details about the generator are not included in this paper.

  3. 3.

    Gra2Mol has a language extension mechanism to introduce new operators, which could be used to improve the default built-in functionality.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/jlcanovas/gra2mol/tree/master/examples/Grammar2Model.examples.101companies.

  5. 5.

    http://share20.eu.

  6. 6.

    http://is.ieis.tue.nl/staff/pvgorp/share/?page=ConfigureNewSession&vdi=Ubuntu12LTS_CS2AS-DSTL---Experiments.vdi.

  7. 7.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16aYZRdKiPOMA_z_85zfVFNLqPPe1XMvNsSdGIw8j7vw/edit?usp=sharing.

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Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, via the LSCITS initiative, and Javier Luís Cánovas Izquierdo (Gra2Mol) and Pieter Van Gorp (SHARE) for the technical support required to produce the results exposed in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Adolfo Sánchez-Barbudo Herrera & Richard F. Paige

  2. Willink Transformations Ltd., Reading, UK

    Edward D. Willink

Authors
  1. Adolfo Sánchez-Barbudo Herrera
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  2. Edward D. Willink
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  3. Richard F. Paige
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adolfo Sánchez-Barbudo Herrera .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Pieter Van Gorp

  2. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Gregor Engels

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Sánchez-Barbudo Herrera, A., Willink, E.D., Paige, R.F. (2016). A Domain Specific Transformation Language to Bridge Concrete and Abstract Syntax. In: Van Gorp, P., Engels, G. (eds) Theory and Practice of Model Transformations. ICMT 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9765. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42064-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42064-6_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42063-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-42064-6

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