from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Tree Transformation Language
TXL
<functional language, rule-based language> (TXL) A hybrid
{functional language} and {rule-based language} developed by
J.R. Cordy <[email protected]> et al of {Queen's
University}, Canada in 1988. TXL is suitable for performing
source to source analysis and transformation and for rapidly
prototyping new languages and language processors. It uses
{structural transformation} based on {term rewriting}.
TXL has been particularly successful in {software engineering}
tasks such as {design recovery}, {refactoring}, and
{reengineering}. Most recently it has been applied to
{artificial intelligence} tasks such as recognition of
hand-written mathematics, and to transformation of {structured
documents} in {XML}.
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 supports the notion of {agile parsing}, the
ability to tailor the grammar to each particular task using
"grammar overrides".
Latest version: FreeTXL 10.3, as of 2003-10-26.
TXL Home (http://txl.ca/).
["TXL: A Rapid Prototyping System for Programming Language
Dialects", J.R. Cordy, C.D.; Halpern and D. Promislow,
Computer Languages, Vol. 16, No. 1, January 1991, pp 97-107]
["Source Transformation in Software Engineering using the TXL
Transformation System", J.R. Cordy, T.R. Dean, A.J. Malton and
K.A. Schneider, Journal of Information and Software
Technology, Vol. 44, No. 13, October 2002, pp 827-837]
["Recognizing Mathematical Expressions Using Tree
Transformation", R. Zanibbi, D. Blostein and J.R. Cordy, IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence,
Vol. 24, No. 11, November 2002, pp 1455-1467]
["Agile Parsing in TXL", T.R. Dean, J.R. Cordy, A.J. Malton
and K.A. Schneider, Journal of Automated Software Engineering,
Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2003, pp 311-336]
(2003-11-04)