A Proposed Software Description Language for Representing Program Logic in XML

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, grade: none, , course: Information Technology , language: English, abstract: This thesis proposes a software description language to represent the source code of

C++, Java, and VB.NET in the Extensible Markup Language. The similarity of

semantics between these languages enables representing the source code in a form such

that both, the source code and logic can be easily shared and reused between these

languages.

By performing semantic and syntactic comparison between C++, Java and VB.NET, the

proposed language has been designed to include the similar and identical features and

language constructs. For every adopted language construct, a corresponding construct in

the proposed language has been developed.

The validity of the proposed language has been investigated and proved theoretically by

conducting a semantic comparison between the three languages and experimentally by

developing applications to convert source code from Java into the proposed language

and from the proposed language into VB.NET. Validation cases have been designed to

include various programs such as sorting, searching and also to include the most used

programming constructs in the three languages. Source code of the validation cases

have been converted from Java into the proposed language, and from the proposed

language into VB.NET. Java and VB.NET programs of the validation cases have been

executed and results compared. The results were identical for all conducted

experiments.

The proposed language has some major benefits in the conversion between

programming languages as an intermediary language. It may also be used in the

integration between systems as it enables sharing of programming logic at runtime.

Existing integration technologies only enable the sharing of data between various

systems.

This thesis is not concerned with adapting programming languages libraries and

functions. Future work may extend the proposed language to adapt different features

such as pointers and multiple-inheritance into the proposed language.