Rascal

De grote berg met software op deze wereld neemt explosief toe. Als ontwikkelaar krijg je steeds vaker te maken met het onderhoud van bestaande software waarvan je de complexe programmacode niet altijd direct kan begrijpen, omdat het bijvoorbeeld slecht is gedocumenteerd. In dit Code fest duiken we in de domein specifieke taal Rascal: een taal die je kan helpen om je programmeercode te analyseren en automatisch te transformeren. Deze avond wordt ingevuld door de onderzoekers van het Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica: Jurgen Vinju, Tijs van der Storm en Bas Basten. Jarenlange ervaring in het software engineering vakgebied heeft ervoor gezorgd dat zij deze veelbelovende taal hebben kunnen ontwikkelen.

Agenda

17:30

Ontvangst

18:00

Eten

18:30

Introductie Rascal

19:00

Workshop: experimenteren met Rascal

21:00

Afsluiting en borrel

Workshop omschrijving

'Rascal is an experimental DSL (Domain Specific Language) for analyzing and transforming source code. Rascal programs are written to transform programs from one version of a language to another, to generate code from a domain specific language, to collect metrics about programs, to reverse engineer the architecture of legacy software, to do impact analysis of bug fixes, to implement refactorings, etc. Our goal is that software engineers can create and adapt their own high quality meta tools instead of having to rely on the plethora of different off-the-shelf and open-source tools with unknown quality. By providing high level language constructs for common meta programming tasks they should be able to construct any kind of meta programming tool with considerably less implementation overhead. Examples of such constructs are parsing, AST construction, complex pattern matching, computing relations between source code artefacts and manipulating these relations, and visualization. Although Rascal is programming language independent, we also envision a library of reusable functionality for specific languages such as COBOL, C and Java.

Rascal and its IDE are currently under development, but a first alpha version is available. In this workshop we would like to introduce you to its main concepts and some of its syntax. Then we will together implement a number of simple analyses of Java source code. Although Rascal is also available without Eclipse, this "online demo" will require you to install a specific version of Eclipse and of course our plugins. The workshop allows you to get a glimpse of state-of-the-art language development in The Netherlands. Also, we are very much interested in your feedback concerning learnability and expressivity of the language. Come and influence the next version of Rascal!'