Paul Klint, Tijs van der Storm, Jurgen J. Vinju. RASCAL: A Domain Specific Language for Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. In Ninth IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2009, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, September 20-21, 2009. pages 168-177, IEEE Computer Society, 2009. [doi]
Many automated software engineering tools require tight integration of techniques for source code analysis and manipulation. State-of-the-art tools exist for both, but the domains have remained notoriously separate because different computational paradigms fit each domain best. This impedance mismatch hampers the development of new solutions because the desired functionality and scalability can only be achieved by repeated and ad hoc integration of different techniques. Rascal is a domain-specific language that takes away most of this boilerplate by integrating source code analysis and manipulation at the conceptual, syntactic, semantic and technical level. We give an overview of the language and assess its merits by implementing a complex refactoring.