INTELLIGENT TRANSFORMATIONS OF FORM REPRESENTATIONS FOR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Software re-engineering aids the programmer by attempting to add the qualities of maintain-ability and understandability to existing computer software. The practice of re-engineering has been constrained by the supposition that algorithms written in poor languages cannot automatically be engineered to an acceptable form. This paper describes a software translation system that ports existing programs into an intermediate language ALICE (Annotated Language Intermediate Code Environment) suitable for representing algorithms from most major families of computer programming languages. An expert system capable of intelligent reasoning about programs will modify and improve the code while programs are represented in the intermediate format.