TXL: a language for text structural transformation, analysis and verification | Hacker News Reader

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

txl.ca

48 pointskxepal12 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.

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

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

Looks interesting but it's non-free software.

There is a free software analogue in development called COLM.

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

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/

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

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?

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

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

http://razum.si/automagical/

Ad hominem comment about comic-sans.

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.

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