Generating logic-based representations for programs

Abstract

Modern software engineering has come to a point where it deals with quite large and complex software artifacts. Labor-intensive activities such as code analysis and code transformation are becoming less and less tractable on such enormous software systems unless a certain level of automatization is provided. Since automatic approaches of code analysis and code transformation strongly rely on software models instead of actual software systems, the software modeling process is of vital interest to a great deal of researchers in the software engineering community. However, the main drawback of most of the software modeling tools available is the fact that they are aimed at software systems written in a certain programming language. This article introduces ProGen, a software tool capable of modeling software systems written in any language for which a plain JAVACC grammar is available, also describing its advantages and limitations.