In this paper we give a brief introduction to the foundations of WSL transformation theory and describe how the concept of program slicing can be formalised in the theory. This formalism naturally lends itself to several generalisations including amorphous slicing and conditioned slicing. One novel generalisation is "semantic slicing" which combines slicing and abstraction to a specification. Interprocedural semantic slicing has been implemented in the FermaT transformation system [16]: an industrial-strength transformation system designed for forward and reverse engineering, re-engineering and program comprehension.

Software reengineering has been described as being "about as easy as reconstructing a pig from a sausage" [11]. But the development of program transformation theory, as embodied in the FermaT transformation system, has made this miraculous feat into a practical possibility. This paper describes the theory...

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms necessary to automatically customize information content, structure, and presentation to the end-user to reduce information overload. Unlike traditional approaches to personalization, the central theme of our approach is to model a website as a program and conduct website transformation for personalization by program transformation (e.g., partial evaluation, program slicing). The goal of this paper is study personalization through a program transformation lens, and develop a formal model, based on program transformations, for personalized interaction with hierarchical hypermedia. The specific research issues addressed involve identifying and developing program representations and transformations suitable for classes of hierarchical hypermedia, and providing supplemental interactions for improving the personalized experience. The primary form of personalization discussed is out-of-turn interaction – a technique which empowers a user navigating a hierarchical website to postpone clicking on any of the hyperlinks presented on the current page and, instead, communicate the

In this paper we give a brief introduction to the foundations of WSL transformation theory and describe some applications to program slicing. We introduce some generalisations of traditional slicing, amorphous slicing and conditioned slicing which are possible in the framework of WSL transformations. One generalisation is "semantic slicing" which combines slicing and abstraction to a specification.

The aim of this paper is to provide a unified mathematical framework for program slicing which places all slicing work, for sequential programs, on a sound theoretical foundation. The main advantage to a mathematical approach is that it is not tied to a particular representation. In fact the mathematics provides a sound basis for any particular representation. We use the WSL (Wide Spectrum Language) program transformation theory as our framework. Within this framework we define a new semantic relation, semi-refinement which lies between semantic equivalence and semantic refinement. Combining this semantic relation, a syntactic relation (called reduction) and WSL’s remove statement, we can give mathematical definitions for backwards slicing, conditioned slicing, static and dynamic slicing and semantic slicing as program transformations in the WSL transformation theory. A novel technique of “encoding ” operational semantics within a denotational semantics allows the framework to handle “operational slicing”. The theory also enables the concept of slicing to be applied to nondeterministic programs. These transformations are implemented in the industry-strength FermaT transformation system.

Research into the working practices of software engineers has shown the need for integrated browsing and searching tools which include graphical visualisations linked back to the source code under investigation. In addition, for assembler maintenance and reengineering there is an even greater need for sophisticated control ow analysis, data ow analysis, slicing and migration technology. All these technologies are provided by the FermaT Workbench: an industrial strength assembler re-engineering workbench consisting of a number of integrated tools for program comprehension, migration and re-engineering. The various program analysis and migrations tools are based on research carried out over the last sixteen years at Durham University, De Montfort University and Software Migrations Ltd., and make extensive use of program transformation theory.

In this paper we describe the legacy assembler problem and describe how the FermaT transformation system is used to reengineer assembler systems and migrate from assembler to C and COBOL.

A program transformation is an operation which can be applied to any program (satisfying the transformations applicability conditions) and returns a semantically equivalent program. In the FermaT transformation system program transformations are carried out in a wide spectrum language, called WSL, and the transformations themselves are written in an extension of WSL called METAWSL which was specifically designed to be a domain-specific language for writing program transformations. As a result, FermaT is capable of transforming its own source code via metatransformations. This paper introduces METAWSL and describes some applications of meta-transformations in the FermaT system.

We apply static analysis and symbolic interpretation techniques to reverse engineering the semantics of legacy assembler code. We examine the case of IBM-1800 programs in detail. From the documented operational semantics of the IBM-1800, we simultaneously obtain an emulator and a symbolic analysis program. Augmented with some control flow information, we can use the symbolic analysis to provide both complete and generic semantics for some interesting code sequences. Based on this, path conditions and generated "correctness" conditions allow us to derive a mixture of denotational and axiomatic semantics for some interesting subsets of assembly programs.