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- Release 5.3 of TXL, a rapid prototyping system for programming languages
- and program transformations, is now available via anonymous ftp from
- qusuna.qucis.queensu.ca (130.15.1.100) in the directory 'txl'. Release
- 5.3 fixes a number of bugs in release 5.2, in particular a bug
- in patterns targeted at left-recursive productions, and adds
- support for arbitrary comment conventions, in particular for C
- and C++ commenting and the %operators.
- TXL 5.3 is distributed in portable ANSI C source form only, and you must
- compile it for your particular Unix system. It has been tested on all of
- the VAX, Sun/3, Sun/4, NeXT, and DECstation MIPS, and meets 'gcc -ansi
- -pedantic' so should compile on almost anything.
- Full information on the details of fetching TXL can be obtained by
- fetching the 00README file, like so:
-
- myunix% ftp 130.15.1.100
- Connected to 130.15.1.100.
- 220 qusuna FTP server (Version 5.56 Thu Apr 18 13:08:27 EDT 1991) ready.
- Name (130.15.1.100:cordy): anonymous
- 331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
- Password: cordy@myunix
- 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
- ftp> cd txl
- 250 CWD command successful.
- ftp> get 00README
- 200 PORT command successful.
- 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for 00README (1688 bytes).
- 226 Transfer complete.
- local: 00README remote: 00README
- 1731 bytes received in 0.04 seconds (42 Kbytes/s)
- ftp> quit
- 221 Goodbye.
- myunix%
-
- I will attempt to service any email requests from those who do not have
- FTP access as well, but such requests will be serviced very slowly over
- the next couple of months and I don't have time to try to fix any email
- addresses that don't work from my site directly as sent to me.
-
- For those of you who have forgotten what TXL is good for, I have
- reproduced the TXL 5.3 ABSTRACT file below.
-
- Jim Cordy
- ---
- Prof. James R. Cordy cordy@qucis.queensu.ca
- Dept. of Computing and Information Science James.R.Cordy@QueensU.CA
- Queen's University at Kingston cordy@qucis.bitnet
- Kingston, Canada K7L 3N6 utcsri!qucis!cordy
-
-
- ----- TXL ABSTRACT -----
-
- Subject: TXL 5.3, a Rapid Prototyping Tool for Computer Languages
-
- Release 5.3 of TXL: Tree Transformation Language is now available via
- anonymous FTP from qusuna.qucis.queensu.ca (130.15.1.100).
-
- TXL 5.3, (c) 1988-1991 Queen's University at Kingston
- -----------------------------------------------------
- Here's the language prototyping tool you've been waiting for! 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 and source
- optimization.
-
- 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 5.3 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.
- --
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