A DSL for Reducing the Accidental Complexities of using Program Transformation Engines

Many software evolution and maintenance problems can be addressed through techniques of program transformation. To facilitate development of language tools assisting software evolution and maintenance, we created a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), named SPOT (Specifying PrOgram Transformation), which can be used to raise the abstraction level of code modification. The design goal is to automate source-tosource program transformations through techniques of code generation, so that developers only need to specify desired transformations using constructs provided by the DSL while being oblivious to the details about how the transformations are performed. The paper provides a general motivation for using program transformation techniques and explains the design details of SPOT. In addition, we present a case study to illustrate how SPOT can be used to build a code coverage tool for applications implemented in different programming languages.