Creating Tools in a Software Environment Based on Graph Rewriting Rules

This paper presents the software development workbench WSDW (Web structure-oriented Software Development Workbench) together with the tool development language TDL. WSDW is an integrated structure-oriented software environment which contains several tools for software evolution. The integration of tools is achieved by sharing a program representation which is based upon the mathematical concept of relation: the web structure is the basic high level representation of programs within the environment. The TDL language is a structure-oriented language that supports the creation of a wide variety of tools both for software development and maintenance. The elementary statements in a TDL program are web rewriting rules and manipulations of programs are expressed as web transformations. Moreover, to make program transformations more intuitive to the tool programmer, web rewriting rules are expressed graphically. Each tool in WSDW performs a sequence of web transformations and new software tools can be implemented as TDL programs and integrated into WSDW