Software Engineering by Source Transformation – Experience with TXL (Most Influential Paper, SCAM 2001)

It has been 30 years since the first publication of TXL, and almost that long since its first public release in the comp.compilers newsgroup in 1991. TXL's original purpose was to provide rapid prototyping of new programming languages and dialects by source-to-source syntactic transformation from new language features to old, and the first applications of TXL demonstrated its use in prototyping new features of the Turing programming language such as objects, polymorphism and interval arithmetic. Very rapidly it became apparent that TXL could be used for much more than that, and we quickly began to explore its wider application in software engineering, in particular to design recovery and code generation from models. With the arrival of the Year 2000 challenge in the mid -90s, TXL made its transition to industrial practice, and was used to analyze and reprogram billions of lines of Cobol, RPG and PL/I code at Legasys Corp and IBM Global Services in the years leading up to 2000.