The Meta-Environment

New developments

Please note that the team of The Meta-Environment has shifted its attention to the development of Rascal, which is intended to fulfill all requirements ASF+SDF users have had and much more. This means that ASF+SDF Meta-Environment will be distributed from this site for a while longer, but no active development is going on anymore. All the activity is at http://www.rascal-mpl.org

The Meta-Environment is

a framework for language development, source code analysis and source code transformation consisting of:

• Syntax analysis tools.
• Semantic analysis and transformation tools.
• An interactive development environment.

The Meta-Environment is an open framework that

• can be easily extended with third-party components;
• can be easily tailored, modified, or extended;
• is supported by an open source community.

The Meta-Environment is a generalization of the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment that has been successfully used in a wide variety of analysis, transformation and renovation projects.

Usage scenarios

The Meta-Environment can be used for many different purposes, including:

• Parsing (new and old) programming languages, for further processing the trees, (e.g. COBOL, C, Java, PL/I, SQL)
• Analysis of source code (fact extraction, type analysis).
• Transformation of source code.
• Generation of source code.
• Design and implementation of domain-specific languages.
• Generation and rapid prototyping of IDE's (Integrated Development Environments) for programming languages and domain specific languages
• Generation of documentation from source code.
• Compilation of domain specific languages (DSL).
• Formal description of the syntax and semantics of (programming) languages.

See our extensive online user Documentation.

Interfaces

To facilitate reuse of components of The Meta-Environment by other toolkits,they are available through a number of different interfaces:

• As an Interactive Development Environment (Screenshots).
• As a collection of command line tools (Documentation).
• As a collection of C and Java libraries (ApiDocumentation).
• As a collection of ToolBus tools.

Each component is released separately for inclusion in other products. See ApiDocumentation for a list of components.

Downloading

• Go to the Download page for:
  • Stable source releases
  • Unstable (continous) source releases
  • Unstable (continous) binary releases for Linux