Program generators and the tools to make them

ABSTRACT

Program generation is among the most promising techniques in the effort to increase the automation of programming tasks. In this paper, we discuss the potential impact and research value of program generation, we give examples of our research in the area, and we outline a future work direction that we consider most interesting. Specifically, we first discuss why program generators have significant applied potential. At the same time we argue that, as a research topic, meta-programming tools (i.e., language tools for writing program generators) may be of greater value. We then illustrate our views on generators and meta-programming tools with our latest work on the Meta-AspectJ meta-programming language and the GOTECH generator. Finally, we examine the problem of statically determining the safety of a generator and present its intricacies. We limit our focus to one particular kind of guarantee for generated code---ensuring that the generated program is free of compile-time errors. We believe that this research direction will see significant attention and will make a difference in the mainstream adoption of meta-programming technology.

REFERENCES

• 1: D. Batory , B. Lofaso , Y. Smaragdakis, JTS: Tools for Implementing Domain-Specific Languages, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Reuse, p.143, June 02-05, 1998
• 2: Cristiano Calcagno , Walid Taha , Liwen Huang , Xavier Leroy, Implementing multi-stage languages using ASTs, Gensym, and reflection, Proceedings of the second international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, p.57-76, September 22-25, 2003, Erfurt, Germany
• 3: Shigeru Chiba, A metaobject protocol for C++, Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.285-299, October 15-19, 1995, Austin, Texas, United States
• 4: William Clinger , Jonathan Rees, Macros that work, Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.155-162, January 21-23, 1991, Orlando, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/99583.99607]
• 5: Neil D. Jones , Arne J. Glenstrup, Program Generation, Termination, and Binding-Time Analysis, The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, p.1-31, October 06-08, 2002
• 6: Gregor Kiczales , Erik Hilsdale , Jim Hugunin , Mik Kersten , Jeffrey Palm , William Griswold, Getting started with ASPECTJ, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.10, p.59-65, Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383845.383858]
• 7: Eugene Kohlbecker , Daniel P. Friedman , Matthias Felleisen , Bruce Duba, Hygienic macro expansion, Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming, p.151-161, August 1986, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/319838.319859]
• 8: Yannis Smaragdakis , Don Batory, Scoping Constructs for Program Generators, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 1996
• 9: Y. Smaragdakis and D. Batory. Application generators. Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 2000. J.G. Webster (ed.), John Wiley and Sons.
• 10: Sergio Soares , Eduardo Laureano , Paulo Borba, Implementing distribution and persistence aspects with aspectJ, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, November 04-08, 2002, Seattle, Washington, USA
• 11: A. Stevens et al. XDoclet Web site, http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/.
• 12: Walid Taha , Tim Sheard, Multi-stage programming with explicit annotations, Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation, p.203-217, June 12-13, 1997, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 13: E. Tilevich, S. Urbanski, Y. Smaragdakis, and M. Fleury. Aspectizing server-side distribution. In Proceedings of the Automated Software Engineering (ASE) Conference. IEEE Press, October 2003.
• 14: Eelco Visser, Meta-programming with Concrete Object Syntax, The ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, p.299-315, October 06-08, 2002
• 15: Daniel Weise , Roger Crew, Programmable syntax macros, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.156-165, June 21-25, 1993, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
• 16: D. Zook, S. S. Huang, and Y. Smaragdakis. Generating AspectJ programs with Meta-AspectJ. In Proceedings of the 2004 Generative Progamming and Component Engineering (GPCE) Conference. Springer-Verlag, to appear.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.2 Automatic Programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.13 Reusable Software
            Subjects: Reusable libraries; Domain engineering
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
meta-programming, program generators, safety guarantees