The supporting environment for a reverse engineering system-the Maintainer's Assistant

Abstract

The Maintainer's Assistant is an interactive tool which helps the user to extract a specification from an existing source code program. It is based on a program transformation system in which a program is converted to a semantically equivalent form using proven transformations selected from a catalog. The author describes environmental support provided in the Maintainer's Assistant. The technical methods used in the tool are summarized and the requirements of the environment are stated. The current implementation is then described and results achieved are discussed. Both the expected and planned developments are summarized.<>