Cost-effective maintenance tools for proprietary languages

Maintenance of proprietary languages and corresponding tooling is expensive. Postponing maintenance to reduce these costs is an often applied, short-term solution which eventually may lead to an unoperational toolset. The paper describes a case study carried out in cooperation with Lucent Technologies where maintenance cost is decreased by simplifying the development process of languages and tools. The development process is simplified by using a language-centered software engineering approach which increases software reuse and language dependent code generation. The case study was concerned with Lucent's proprietary SDL dialect and involved the re-engineering of an SDL grammar and the construction of an SDL documentation generator.