©Copyright in this paper belongs to the author(s) ISBN: 3-540-76228-0 Obtaining a COBOL Grammar from Legacy Code for Reengineering Purposes

We argue that maintenance and reengineering tools need to have a thorough knowledge of the language that the code is written in. More specifically, for the family of COBOL languages we present a general method to define COBOL dialects that are based on the actual code that has to be reengineered or maintained. Subsequently, we give some typical examples of maintenance and reengineering tools that have been specified on top of such a COBOL grammar in order to show that our approach is useful and leads to accurate and relatively simple maintenance and reengineering tools