Software maintenance: generating front ends for cross referencer tools

Abstract

This thesis surveys the activities performed in software maintenance and identifies some of the software tools which can be utilised by the maintenance programmer. The most expensive phase of software maintenance is surveyed in more detail and tools to support this activity are identified. A new class of cross referencer tool was designed and investigated. The novel aspect of the cross referencer is that it can be used on more than one language, by utihzing grammar driven generators to customize and make maximum re-use of the language independent components, allowing language specific implementations to be generated with minimal effort. The cross referencer also extends an idea of having different levels of detail in cross reference listings by allowing the tool implementor to specify the contents of each level of detail. A proposed experimental toolkit for the automatic construction of these cross referencer front end tools, from non procedural specifications, is designed and investigated.