System for generating reverse engineering tools: A case study of software modularization

The paper presents a case study in the development of software modularization tools. The tools are produced by using a system for developing code analyzers that uses a database to store both a no-loss fine-grained intermediate representation and the analyses' results. The analyzers are automatically generated from a high-level specification of the desired analyses expressed in a domain-oriented language. We use a program intermediate representation, called F(p), as the user-visible data base conceptual model. Analyzers are specified in a declarative language, called F(p) - l, which allows the specification of an analysis in the form of a traversal of an algebraic expression, with accesses to, and stores of, the database information the algebraic expression indexes. A foreign language interface allows the analyzers to be embedded into C programs. This is useful, for example, to implement the user interface of an analyzer or to facilitate interoperation of the generated analyzers with pre-existing tools.