TXL - A Language for Programming Language Tools and Applications

Abstract

TXL is a special-purpose programming language designed for creating, manipulating and rapidly prototyping language descriptions, tools and applications. TXL is designed to allow explicit programmer control over the interpretation, application, order and backtracking of both parsing and rewriting rules. Using first order functional programming at the higher level and term rewriting at the lower level, TXL provides for flexible programming of traversals, strategies, guards, scope of application and parameterized context. This flexibility has allowed TXL users to express and experiment with both new ideas in parsing, such as robust, island and agile parsing, and new paradigms in rewriting, such as XML markup, rewriting strategies and contextualized rules, without any change to TXL itself. In this paper I outline the history, evolution and concepts of TXL with emphasis on what makes it different from other language manipulation tools, and give examples of its use in expressing and applying recent new paradigms in language processing.

Evolving a DSL Implementation

“…TXL [15] and ASF+SDF are similar, generic source to source transformation languages [16]. Both are are mature and efficient; TXL has been used to process billions of lines of code [15].…”

“…Both are are mature and efficient; TXL has been used to process billions of lines of code [15]. Furthermore such approaches are inherently flexible as they can be used with arbitrary source and target languages; unlike Converge, they can embed DSLs into any host language.…”

SMT-C: A Semantic Mutation Testing Tools for C

“…It has been used for mutant generation before [11], [28]. TXL is a general source transformation language with a long history [18]. A transformation process based on TXL has two steps.…”

“…We consider two aspects of the second question: is it possible to merge the SMT with other widely applied test routines; is it easy to integrated SMT of the C programming language Finally, we came up with SMT-C which is the first tool that does both traditional and weak SMT for C. It contains a set of modules including an Eclipse-based front end; uses Check [17] as a test harness and TXL [18] to generate the semantic mutants.…”

ScienceTreks: an autonomous digital library system

“…For the first step we have analyzed, tested and adapted for the specific application, existing state-of-the-art implementation of specialized FSM-based lexical grammar parser for fast text processing (Kiyavitskaya et al, 2006), (Cordy, 2004). For the second step we have investigated and developed statistical methods that allow metadata correction and enrichment without the need to access external information sources.…”