Paper Info
Title
Language evolution in practice: the history of GMF
Abstract
In consequence of changing requirements and technological progress, software languages are subject to change. The changes affect the language’s specification, which in turn affects language processors as well as existing language utterances. Unfortunately, little is known about how software languages evolve in practice. This paper presents a case study on the evolution of four modeling languages provided by the Graphical Modeling Framework. It investigates the following research questions: (1) What is the impact of language changes on related software artifacts?, (2) What activities are performed to implement language changes? and (3) What kinds of adaptations capture the language changes? We found out that the language changes affect various kinds of related artifacts; the distribution of the activities performed to evolve the languages mirrors the classical software maintenance activities, and most language changes can be captured by a small suite of operators that can also be used to migrate the language utterances.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-12107-4_3
SLE
Keywords
Field
DocType
software language,classical software maintenance activity,graphical modeling framework,related artifact,modeling language,language processor,language utterance,language evolution,case study,related software artifact,language change,software maintenance,technological progress
Programming language,Computer science,Fourth-generation programming language,Modeling language,Object language,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Universal Networking Language,Specification language,Programming language specification,Software engineering,High-level programming language,Natural language
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
5969
0302-9743
3-642-12106-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
32
1.33
22
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Markus Herrmannsdoerfer143323.43
Daniel Ratiu249338.87
Guido Wachsmuth334819.44