Section: New Software and Platforms

Rascal

Keywords: Metaprogramming - Language

Scientific Description

Rascal primitives include immutable data, context-free grammars and algebraic data-types, relations, relational calculus operators, advanced patterns matching, generic type-safe traversal, comprehensions, concrete syntax for objects, lexically scoped backtracking, and string templates for code generation. It has libraries for integrating language front-ends, for reusing analysis algorithms, for getting typed meta-data out of version management systems, for interactive visualization, etc.

Functional Description

Rascal is a programming language, such that meta programs can be created by, understood by, and debugged by programmers.

You want to use the best tool for the job when analyzing, transforming or generating source code, so normally you will end up with many different tools, possibly even written in different languages. Now the problem is to integrate these tools again. Rascal solves this problem by integrating source code analysis, transformation, and generation primitives on the language level. Use it for any kind of metaprogramming task: to construct parsers for programming languages, to analyze and transform source code, or to define new DSLs with full IDE support.

• Participants: Paul Klint, Jurgen Vinju, Tijs Van Der Storm, Davy Landman, Bert Lisser, Atze Van Der Ploeg, Vadim Zaytsev, Anastasia Izmaylova, Michael Steindorfer, Jouke Stoel, Ali Afroozeh and Ashim Shahi

• Contact: Paul Klint

• URL: http://www.rascal-mpl.org/