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ABSTRACT
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Subject: TXL 6.0, a Rapid Prototyping Tool for Computer Languages
Release 6.0 of TXL: Tree Transformation Language is now available
via anonymous FTP from qusuna.qucis.queensu.ca (130.15.1.100).
Change directory to "txl" and fetch the file "00README" for full
information on fetching it. An email version is available on
request for those who have no access to ftp.
Release 6.0 fixes all known bugs, extends TXL to smoothly handle
languages with multiple comment conventions, has better diagnostics,
is more robust, and has many other improvements over the previous
release.
For those of you unfamiliar with TXL, here is a short abstract:
TXL 6.0, (c) 1988-1992 Queen's University at Kingston
-----------------------------------------------------
TXL is a generalized source-to-source translation system suitable for
rapidly prototyping computer languages and langauge processors
of any kind. It has been used to prototype several new programming
languages as well as specification languages, command languages,
and more traditional program transformation tasks such as constant
folding, type inference, source optimization and reverse engineering.
TXL is NOT a compiler technology tool, rather it is a tool for use
by average programmers in quickly prototyping languages and linguistic
tasks. TXL takes as input an arbitrary context-free grammar in
extended BNF-like notation, and a set of show-by-example
transformation rules to be applied to inputs parsed using the grammar.
TXL will automatically parse inputs in the language described by the
grammar, no matter if ambiguous or recursive, and then successively
apply the transformation rules to the parsed input until they fail,
producing as output a formatted transformed source.
TXL is particularly well suited to the rapid prototyping of parsers
(e.g., producing a Modula 2 parser took only the half hour to type in
the Modula 2 reference grammar directly from the back of Wirth's book),
pretty printers (e.g., a Modula 2 paragrapher took another ten minutes
to insert output formatting clues in the grammar), and custom or
experimental dialects of existing programming languages (e.g.,
Objective Turing was prototyped by transforming to pure Turing and
using the standard Turing compiler to compile the result).
TXL 6.0 comes with fully portable ANSI C source automatically translated
from the Turing Plus original, self-instruction scripts and a pile of
examples of its use in various applications.
Jim Cordy
Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
cordy@qucis.queensu.ca