UVLParser: Extending UVL with Language Levels and Conversion Strategies

The Universal Variability Language (UVL) is a community effort towards a widely adopted textual specification for feature models. For widespread usage, the language should be simple to understand and easy to embed in existing tools. Also, many different use cases should be covered, which requires an expressive language design. To incorporate these clashing requirements in UVL, we enrich the language with several optional extensions that add more expressive language features. Furthermore, we provide conversion strategies that translate between those language levels by replacing the complex constructs with equivalent but simpler ones. With our library, other tool developers can select their supported language levels and automatically convert more complex language constructs. Those constructs are then replaced with semantically equivalent expressions that are supported by the tool.