Brewing fresh Java from legacy Lisp-an experiment in automated reverse engineering

The issues of re-engineering and reverse engineering have become important ones in the computing industry. A legacy system that has evolved has usually been worked on by many different programmers and reflects the different programming styles as practised by those programmers. We address the re-engineering of a large system, the TAMPR automatic program transformation system, written in pure Lisp. TAMPR is an essential tool in ongoing research on potential applications of automated program transformation. The program implementing the TAMPR system is better designed and more consistently coded than most legacy systems. Why, then, is reverse engineering being attempted for this system, given that it suffers few of the problems of more traditionally implemented legacy systems? We are interested in studying the problem of abstraction in reverse engineering, and the TAMPR system, with its systematic design and coding, provides a good starting point for studying approaches to automated abstraction to an object-oriented form. In addition, while the system in its present form meets the current needs of its users, there are problems with providing widely available, efficient implementations of the system. The target language for this experiment in reverse engineering is Java. Java was chosen because of its widespread availability, claimed portability and its integration with components for the construction of graphical user interfaces. We use TAMPR transformations to reverse engineer the TAMPR program itself.