TXL: a language for text structural transformation, analysis and verification

TXL: a language for text structural transformation, analysis and verification(txl.ca)

48 points by kxepal 11 years ago | 12 comments

Appearance matters.

The font makes the page very hard to read and lends an impression of silliness to what is obviously a very serious project.

jdnier 11 years ago | |

It looks reasonable in Chrome on Linux... until I looked at the source, which is littered with <FONT FACE="Comic Sans MS"> tags.

devhead 11 years ago | |

+1 that was the first thing i saw. came here to see if it was a joke. http://www.comicsanscriminal.com

yarrel 11 years ago |

Looks interesting but it's non-free software.

enqk 11 years ago | |

There is a free software analogue in development called COLM.

http://www.colm.net/open-source/colm/

evacchi 11 years ago | | |

With respect to Program Transformation, I'd point out Stratego/Spoofax [1] and Kiama [2]

  [1] http://strategoxt.org/Spoofax  
  [2] https://code.google.com/p/kiama/

DannyBee 11 years ago |

TXL has been around for 20+ years now, it's interesting but just never going to be used in production :)

thisrod 11 years ago | |

It seems to be meant for research and development, not as the asteroid from the lex manpage. It would make sense as a teaching language for compilers, too. The people who need to know how Lex and Yacc work could read the Dragon Book later.

I wonder if Alan Kay and the Viewpoints mob knew about this, and if so, why they bothered with O-Meta?

cdhdc 11 years ago | |

It has been used successfully in production. According to this webpage http://www.infoq.com/articles/dsl-interaction-txl it was used for Y2K analysis and conversions of over 3.5 billion lines at IBM Global Services.

Edit: Better reference paper: http://ftp.qucis.queensu.ca/home/cordy/Papers/TXLSE_IST.pdf

cdhdc 11 years ago | |

Automagical is an Objective-C to C# source code transformation system that uses TXL under the hood.

http://razum.si/automagical/

northisup 11 years ago |

Ad hominem comment about comic-sans.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11 years ago | |

The people who need this (like I did a few years ago) if they notice it at all are still willing to suffer through plenty.