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Stratego/XT 0.13

Stratego -- Strategies for Program Transformation
Stratego/XT 0.13 -- released January 13, 2005

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License

StrategoXT is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

Support

Despite the disclaimer above we do our best to help users of Stratego/XT. Subscribe to the Stratego mailing lists, in particular the stratego-announce and stratego mailing lists to get announcements of new releases and ask questions about usage of the languages and tools. Also we're interested to know what people are using Stratego/XT for and how it might be improved, so feel free to drop us a line.

Summary of Changes

StrategoXT 0.13, which represents over 3 months of development, features updates of the Stratego compiler, the Stratego language, and many transformation tools. Highlights include a new language feature for dependent dynamic rules, several bug-fixes and usability improvements of the Stratego compiler, improved reporting of parse errors in sglri (and the Stratego compiler), more useful error reports in sdf2rtg, and much more!

Stratego Language

Dependent Dynamic Rules

Dynamic rules are undefined when a new rule with the same left-hand side is defined. For example, consider the following fragment of a constant propagation transformation: 

  prop-const-assign =
    ? |[ x := e ]|
    ; if <is-value> e
      then rules( PropConst.x :  |[ x ]| -> |[ e ]| )
      else rules( PropConst.x :- |[ x ]| )
      end

When encountering an assignment a new dynamic rule rewriting |[ x ]| to |[ e ]| is defined when e is a value. If e is not a value the dynamic rule is undefined (for x). These definitions undefine any previous PropConst rules with |[ x ]| as left-hand side. This works for constant propagation since e is a constant value, not affected by subsequent assignments.

This approach is not sufficient in the case where the right-hand side of the rule contains object variables, or where the left-hand side is a more complex pattern (as in the case of common-subexpression elimination) including object variables. Consistently undefining such dynamic rules requires keeping track of the dependencies of a dynamic rule on certain terms (e.g., object variables). This can be expressed with 0.12 dynamic rules, but at the cost of quite some code.

To capture this recurring pattern, StrategoXT 0.13 introduces dependent dynamic rules, which list all the terms on which a rule depends. For example, the following fragment defines the essential part of a copy propagation transformation: 

  copy-prop-assign =
    ? |[ x := y ]|
    ; where( <kill-CopyProp> x )
    ; where( <not(eq)>(x,y) )
    ; where( innermost-scope-CopyProp => z )
    ; rules( CopyProp.z : |[ x ]| -> |[ y ]| depends on [(x,x), (y,y)] )

The depends on clause declares all dependencies of the CopyProp rule and the invocation of kill-CopyProp undefines all previously defined rules depending on x, even those with x in the right-hand side.

Dependent dynamic rules are a generative extension of basic dynamic rules as described in

M. Bravenboer, A. van Dam, K. Olmos, and E. Visser. Program Transformation with Scoped Dynamic Rewrite Rules. Conditionally accepted for the special issue on program transformation of Fundamenta Informaticae, 2005.

An account of the dependent dynamic rule extension is given in

K. Olmos and E. Visser. Composing Source-to-Source Data-Flow Transformations with Rewriting Strategies and Dependent Dynamic Rewrite Rules. In R. Bodik, editor, 14th International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC'05). Springer-Verlag, April 2005.

and the extended technical report.

(Eelco Visser)

Stratego Compiler

Compilation of Pattern-Matching in Dynamic Rules

Pattern matching in dynamic rules is implemented by replacing non-context (that is, rule application specific) variables in the left-hand side of the rule by dummy terms. This dummy term used to be the empty list, which caused some problems if the pattern already contains empty lists. The dynamic rule dummy term is now DR_DUMMY(), which solves these issues.

Note that two rules that have the same left-hand side pattern, except for an empty list in the first and a non-context variable in the second, now also have a different key. If you want them to have the same key, then you can for example move the [] pattern to the where condition of the dynamic rule.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Redefinition of External Strategies

In program that use separate compilation, redefinition of external strategies was not always detected in the previous release. If a redefined strategy was only invoked from the code that was separately compiled, then the redefinition was not noticed by the compiler. This has now been fixed. This fix might break existing code that use separate compilation, but it only breaks code if something was already wrong.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Disable SGLR Heuristic Filters from Meta File

By default, SGLR applies some heuristic filters for removing ambiguities in parse trees. Using these heuristic filters are discouraged, since these disambiguations are not explicitly defined in a syntax definition. The heuristic filters can now be disabled per Stratego module by including the term HeuristicFilters(Off) in the .meta file for that module. This is particularly useful if you are using a lot of concrete object syntax or if you are implementing an object language embedding in Stratego. Disabling the heuristic filters makes ambiguities and non-ambiguities in this mixture of languages less surprising. See the next subsection for an example.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Improved Reporting of Ambiguities

If you are using concrete object syntax in Stratego, then you might encounter ambiguities in your Stratego program, in particular if you disable the heuristic filters of SGLR. Ambiguities in the Stratego code (not in the object code) caused the compiler to fail in a horrible way during C compilation. This has now been fixed by detecting these ambiguities and reporting them in a more user-friendly way.

For example, consider this Stratego program 

module foo
imports Stratego list-cons tuple-cons
strategies

  main =
    !|[ Foo ]|

and its .meta file: 

Meta([
  Syntax("StrategoStratego")
, HeuristicFilters(Off())
])

The generated |[ Foo ]| construct is highly ambiguous, which is now reported as: 

martin@logistico:~/tmp/str> strc -i foo.str
compiling foo.str
error: ambiguity in the definition of main. Alternatives:
    - Op("CallNoArgs",[Op("SVar",[Str("Foo")])])
    - Op("Var",[Str("Foo")])
    - Op("ConstType",[Op("SortNoArgs",[Str("Foo")])])

This list shows that |[ Foo ]| can be a strategy call, a term variable, or a type. The ambiguity report uses abstract syntax for Stratego, which might be improved to concrete syntax or a better explanation in the future. The problem with a report in concrete syntax is that the syntax for these case is usually identical, so it should be combined with abstract syntax and/or syntactical types (e.g. this fragment can be a strategy, term, or type).

(Martin Bravenboer)

Cons and Nil: Special Constructor Names

Cons/2 (Cons with two argument terms) and Nil/0 are reserved constructor names in Stratego, used for the representation of lists. The compiler handled these constructors names somewhat sloppy in previous releases, resulting in compilation errors for programs that use Cons and Nil constructor names with a different arity. This has now been fixed, hence only Cons/2 and Nil/0 are reserved constructor names from now.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Stratego Library

Changes in Separate compilation

In the previous version of StrategoXT, the separately compiled liblib library imported the SSL as well as the XTC library. The liblib library has now been split into libstrategolib (the SSL) and libxtclib (XTC). The module liblib is still available and imports the libraries above. Thus, no existing Stratego programs should be affected.

(Eelco Visser)

Obsolete Strategy: iowrap

The strategy iowrap is obsolete. Many releases ago it was replaced by io-wrap, which is easier to use, thanks to the storage of command-line option values in the global config table. Developers that still use iowrap will now get a warning. Please update your code, since obsolete strategies might be removed in the future.

(Rob Vermaas)

New Module: Logging

A small library for logging has been added to the Stratego Standard Library (it used to be part of the stratego-regular package). The log strategy in the logging module combines several features:

  • The log strategy does not change the current term. Thus, it is easy to insert anywhere in your code. Optionally, it takes a term argument that will be logged as well. Thus, you can easily log a different term then the current term.

  • The log strategies print to the stream specified by the log-stream entry in the config table, or by default to stderr. This makes logging to different files easier from within a Stratego program.

  • The log strategies take a severity argument, which is used to determine whether the message should be logged at all, based on the verbosity level specified on the command-line.

  • The log message will include the name of the program that produced the message, and the severity of the message.

(Niels Janssen and Martin Bravenboer)

New Strategy: call with Optional Redirection

The SSL now includes a strategy that makes the redirections of file descriptors from method calls much easier. This new call strategy takes three term arguments, which are optional (Some or None) file descriptors for the stdin, stdout, and stderr of the new process. This strategy makes it easier to write to result of a program invocation to some file, without knowing all the nasty low-level functions of processes and IO.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Bug Fixes: Pipe module

The strategies stdin-from-pipe and stdout-to-pipe didn't work correctly when the pipe argument was stdin (0) or stdout (1). Since stdin and stdout were explicitly closed, the connection with the pipe was lost. Using dup2 instead of dup solves the problem because there is no need to close file descriptors. write-term-to-text-pipe uses WriteToTextFile but the outfile argument is a stream. Replacing WriteToTextFile by fprint solved the problem.

(Merijn de Jonge)

StrategoXT Deployment and Build System

Separate Package for StrategoXT Utils

Tools that are not essential to most Stratego users are now in a separate package, strategoxt-utils. This package consists of the ex-StrategoXT packages aterm-tools, dot-tools, graph-tools, stratego-util and stratego-tools. Obviously, the installation of this package is optional and most users will only need if you want to visualize ATerms with the Dot language and Graphviz.

More concrete, the following tools are part of strategoxt-utils: GraphXML2dot, pp-dot, sdf-wf, term-to-dot, tohtml-sdf, graph-term2GraphXML, GraphXML-analysis, pp-stratego-latex-alltt, sdf-doc, sdf-wf, tohtml, GraphXML2dot, ismap2usemap, sdf2sg, sdf-imports, and term-to-adot. The Emacs mode for Stratego is now part of StrategoXT Utils.

In future releases, more non-essential utils might be moved to the strategoxt-utils package.

(Rob Vermaas)

AutoXT

All the Autoconf macros of AutoXT now use the XT_ prefix. Using such a prefix is adviced by the Autoconf guidelines and makes it easier to detect errors (e.g. missing macro definitions). USE_XT_PACKAGES has now been replaced by XT_USE_XT_PACKAGES. The old macro is still available as an autoupdate alias. You can run autoupdate to upgrade your configure.ac files. DETECT_SVN_REVISION is now defined as an autoupdate alias as well (Use XT_SVN_REVISION).

(Akim Demaille and Martin Bravenboer)

AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR

The subpackages of StrategoXT now share a single directory for auxiliary files used by autoconf, automake and libtool (such as ltmain.sh, config.guess). The configure.ac files in StrategoXT define an AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR to achieve this.

(Akim Demaille and Martin Bravenboer)

StrategoXT Transformation Tools

sglri

The program sglri, which combines sglr and implode-asfix, now supports error reporting with a quote of the code from the input source file.

For example, consider this module: 

module foo
strategies
  main = Foo
  Foo =
   1 -> 2

The error report of sglri is now: 

martin@logistico:~/tmp> sglri -p Stratego.tbl -i foo.str
foo.str: character '>' unexpected at line 8, column 7
  Foo =
   1 -> 2
      ^
The Stratego compiler now uses sglri, so it will report syntax errors in this way as well.

Another new feature of sglri is an option to disable the heuristic filters of sglr by passing --no-heuristic-filters. You don't have to know all the details of heuristic filters to use this option. Disabling heuristic filters is strongly encouraged.

(Rob Vermaas and Martin Bravenboer)

aterm2xml and xml2aterm

The --explicit and --very-explicit mode of these ATerm and XML interoperability tools now use the XML namespace http://aterm.org for XML elements that represent ATerm structures and types, such as list, tuple, int, string, anno etc. In the explicit mode, this avoids conflicts with 'real' ATerms of the same name. The tools use the namespace prefix 'at'.

Furthermore, all modes now preserve all ATerm annotations by representing them as nested anno elements in the XML namespace http://aterm.org.

The xml2aterm tool nog longer needs an explicity argument, since it is no longer ambiguous whether the XML input is implicit, explicit or very explicit.

(Martin Bravenboer)

pp-aterm

The pp-aterm tool, which is used for printing an ATerm in a more clear and structured layout, now accepts an --max-depth flag. This is useful if you are only interested in the outer structure of an ATerm and the ATerm is very large.

(Rob Vermaas)

sdf2rtg

The sdf2rtg tool, which is used to produce RTGs (and indirectly Stratego Signatures) from SDF syntax definitions, now reports errors in concrete syntax and gives some hints about possible solutions of the problem.

Example: 

definition
module Main
exports
  context-free start-symbols Exp
  sorts Exp IntConst
  context-free syntax
    Exp "+" Exp -> Exp
    IntConst -> Exp

  lexical syntax
    [0-9]+ -> IntConst


martin@logistico:~/tmp> sdf2rtg -i Foo.def
No constructor name specified in production:
   <Exp-CF> <LAYOUT?-CF> "+" <LAYOUT?-CF> <Exp-CF> -> <Exp-CF>
Resolution: please add a cons attribute to this production.

(Martin Bravenboer)

Detailed List of Issues

The full list of issues closed in this release is available at:

Download and Installation

The release page contains the source distributions, binary RPMs, and detailed instructions on how to install the distributions:

Bugs and Known Problems

See our issue tracking systems for reports about (open) bugs:

Please report any problems with installation or bugs in the implementation to our issue tracking system. Please check the existing issues to see if a report about the problem was already submitted.

Contributions

Developments, beta tests, and bug fixes were carried out by

  • Martin Bravenboer
  • Akim Demaille
  • Niels Janssen
  • Merijn de Jonge
  • Karl Trygve Kalleberg
  • Rob van der Leek
  • Rob Vermaas
  • Eelco Visser

Thanks!