Software ENgineering Pretty-printing for software reengineering

CWI's research has a theme-oriented structure and is grouped into four clusters. Listed below are the names of the clusters and in parentheses their acronyms. 1. INTRODUCTION Software reengineering is concerned with changing and repairing existing software systems. Software reengi-neering is often language dependent and customer specific. For instance, Dutch banks have to standardize their bank account numbers before the second quarter of 2004 [15]. To that end, a restructuring reengineering [3] might be implemented for a particular Dutch bank to reengineer his COBOL-85 dialect, by changing account numbers from 9 to 10 digits while preserving his specific coding conventions. Although the reengineering itself is of general use for all Dutch banks, this specific implementation is hard to reuse. When a reengineering company wants to develop such reengineerings for different customers and different language dialects (for instance to support the bank account number reengineering for some other of the 300 existing COBOL dialects [14]), problematic reuse may easily lead to a significant maintenance effort. A reengineering company would therefore benefit when reuse of reengineerings could be improved, such that reengineerings for new customers or language dialects can be developed rapidly from existing ones and time to market can be decreased [18]. Developing reusable reengineerings requires advanced language technology to easily deal with multiple customers and language dialects. The literature contains many articles addressing flexible parsing and processing techniques. Flexible, reusable pretty-printing techniques are not very well addressed and are the subject of this paper. Pretty-printing in the software reengineering area serves two purposes. Firstly, for automatic software reengineering pretty-printing is used for source (re-) generation, to transform the abstract representation of a reengineered program back to human readable textual form. Usually, a pretty-printer then is the last phase