Pretty-printing for software reengineering

Abstract

Automatic software reengineering changes or repairs existing software systems. They are usually tailor-made for a specific customer and language dependent. Maintaining similar reengineering for multiple customers and different language dialects may, therefore, soon become problematic unless advanced language technology is used. Generic pretty-printing is part of such technology and is the subject of this paper. We discuss specific pretty-print aspects of software reengineering such as fulfilling customer-specific format conventions, preserving existing layout, and producing multiple output formats. In addition, we describe pretty-print techniques that help to reduce maintenance effort of tailor-made reengineering supporting multiple language dialects. Applications such as COBOL reengineering and SDL documentation generation show that our techniques, implemented in the generic pretty-printer GPP, are feasible.