arXiv subjects

Ralf Lämmel

Publications and source records attributed to Ralf Lämmel.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

A Literature Survey on Empirical Evidence in Software Engineering

Context: Software Engineering research makes use of collections of software artifacts (corpora) to derive empirical evidence from. Goal: To improve quality and reproducibility of research, we need to understand the characteristics of used corpora. Method: For that, we perform a literature survey using grounded theory. We analyze the latest proceedings of seven relevant conferences. Results: While almost all papers use corpora of some kind with the common case of collections of source code of open-source Java projects, there are no frequently used projects or corpora across all the papers. For some conferences we can detect recurrences. We discover several forms of requirements and applied tunings for corpora which indicate more specific needs of research efforts. Conclusion: Our survey feeds into a quantitative basis for discussing the current state of empirical research in software engineering, thereby enabling ultimately improvement of research quality specifically in terms of use (and reuse) of empirical evidence.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2011

Tutorial on Online Partial Evaluation

This paper is a short tutorial introduction to online partial evaluation. We show how to write a simple online partial evaluator for a simple, pure, first-order, functional programming language. In particular, we show that the partial evaluator can be derived as a variation on a compositionally defined interpreter. We demonstrate the use of the resulting partial evaluator for program optimization in the context of model-driven development.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2010

Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification

Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2010

Automated co-evolution of GMF editor models

The Eclipse Graphical Modeling (GMF) Framework provides the major approach for implementing visual languages on top of the Eclipse platform. GMF relies on a family of modeling languages to describe different aspects of the visual language and its implementation in an editor. GMF uses a model-driven approach to map the different GMF models to Java code. The framework, as it stands, provides very little support for evolution. In particular, there is no support for propagating changes from say the domain model (i.e., the abstract syntax of the visual language) to other models. We analyze the resulting co-evolution challenge, and we provide a transformation-based solution, say GMF model adapters, that serve the propagation of abstract-syntax changes based on the interpretation of difference models.

cs.SE↗