FermaT Transformation System


The FermaT Transformation System is an industrial strength program
transformation system targeted at reverse engineering, program comprehension
and migration between programming languages. The system is currently being
used to translate IBM 370 Assembler modules into equivalent readable and
maintainable C and COBOL programs.
FermaT is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.
A program transformation is any operation which changes the text
of a program without changing its external behaviour. A simple example
is reversing the arms of an IF statement:

IF x = 0 THEN y := 1 ELSE y := 2 FI

is semantically equivalent to:

IF x <> 0 THEN y := 2 ELSE y := 1 FI

A more complex example of a program transformation is Semantic Slicing. Consider the following WSL program:

total:= 0;
i := 0;
evens := 0;
noevens := 0;
odds := 0;
noodds := 0;
n := n0;
WHILE i <= n DO
 evenflag := A MOD 2;
 evenflag := 0;
 IF FALSE
 THEN evens := evens + A;
 noevens := noevens + 1
 ELSE odds := odds + A;
 noodds := noodds + 1 FI;
 total := total + A;
 i := i + 1 OD;
IF noevens <> 0
 THEN meaneven := evens/noevens
 ELSE meaneven := 0 FI;
IF noodds <> 0
 THEN meanodd := odds/noodds
 ELSE meanodd := 0 FI;
mean := total/;
evendifference := ABS;
odddifference := ABS

Suppose we are interested in the final value of the variable evendifference. Save the program as a text file test-1.wsl and run the transformation:

dotrans test-1.wsl test-2.wsl Semantic_Slice data=evendifference

This generates the output file test-2.wsl:

evendifference
 := ABS / )

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