Using an enabling technology to reengineer legacy systems

Frontiers of reverse engineering: A conceptual model

“…Such a repository can be internal to a particular tool, thus not accessible from the outside, or it can be queried by other tools. Examples of information bases include: the repository of the CIA environment [14], or the object-oriented database (Refine) used by the the Software Refinery toolkit [39] to store a fine-grained program model in the form of an attributed Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). The Tuple Attribute (TA) language [29] represents facts related to programs-although applications of TA are not limited to programs-as a set of binary relations.…”

“…Several systems implement Turing complete languages to query the information base and build software views. For example, the language implemented in the Software Refinery toolkit [39] supports different paradigms, including the procedural, object-oriented, and declarative paradigms, and the latter in both logic and transformational style. Logic programming, and in particular the Prolog programming language, has also been advocated as a means for querying an information base [9].…”

New Frontiers of Reverse Engineering

“…Many fact extractors (i.e., tools extracting intermediate representations from the source code and storing it into databases) were created. Examples include CIA [26] or the Software Refinery toolkit [80], that used an object-oriented database, called Refine, to store a fine grained program model in the form of an attributed Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).…”

Building program understanding tools using visitor combinators

“…Their traversals have been generalized in the context of ASF+SDF in [1]. Similar traversals are present in the Refine toolset [12], which contains a pre-order and postorder traversal. In both cases, only a few traversal strategies are provided, and little support is available for composing complex traversals from basic building blocks or controlling the visiting behavior.…”