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Reducing the Verbosity of Imperative Model Refinements by Using General-Purpose Language Facilities

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Theory and Practice of Model Transformation (ICMT 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10374))

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Abstract

Refinements are model transformations that leave large parts of the source models unchanged. Therefore, if refinements are executed outplace, model elements need to be copied to the target model. Refinements written in imperative languages are increasingly verbose, unless suitable language facilities exist for creating these copies implicitly. Thus, for languages restricted to general-purpose facilities, the verbosity of refinements is still an open problem. Existing approaches towards reducing this verbosity suffer from the complexity of developing a higher-order transformation to synthesize the copying code. In this paper, we propose a generic transformation library for creating implicit copies, reducing the verbosity without a higher-order transformation. We identify the underlying general-purpose language facilities, and compare state-of-the-art languages against these requirements. We give a proof of concept using the imperative QVTo language, and showcase the ability of our library to reduce the verbosity of an industrial-scale transformation chain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ckrause.org/2013/04/copying-emf-models-with-henshin.html

  2. 2.

    http://muml.org/implicitcopy/updates

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Marie Christin Platenius and Anthony Anjorin for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper, and Mario Treiber for assisting in our validation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany

    Christopher Gerking

  2. Fraunhofer IEM, Paderborn, Germany

    David Schubert & Ingo Budde

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  1. Christopher Gerking
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  2. David Schubert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher Gerking .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Esther Guerra

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Mark van den Brand

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Gerking, C., Schubert, D., Budde, I. (2017). Reducing the Verbosity of Imperative Model Refinements by Using General-Purpose Language Facilities. In: Guerra, E., van den Brand, M. (eds) Theory and Practice of Model Transformation. ICMT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10374. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61473-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61473-1_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61472-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61473-1

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