Case study: an infrastructure for C/ATLAS environments with object-oriented design and XML representation

In this paper, we present an ATLAS compiler environment used for automatic testing as a case study to demonstrate the design of the state of the art compiler environments with object-oriented designs and XML representations. ATLAS is a testing language which is applied on the automatic test equipments (ATE). Currently, the programming language is used in the fields of avionics, industry facilities, and precision transport system. In this work, we develop the ATLAS compiler aiming to provide the control ability of the PCbased ATEs. First, it comes with an objected-oriented representation of program trees. The object-oriented program graph allows the flexibility for the manipulations of program trees. Second, it employs the object serialization technology for storing and retrieving the syntax trees and program graphs. The employment of object serialization techniques significantly reduces the programming effort from traditional compiler work in retrieving binary representations of program graphs from secondary storages. In addition, we establish the connection between the object-oriented program graph and XML representations. With the support of DTD and XSL files of XML environments, we can perform machine validation on XML-based representations, transform XML representations into graph structures, and annotate the representations for human browsing. Our software infrastructure can be used for subsequent controls and specifications for ATEs.