Modernizing parsing tools: parsing and analysis with object-oriented programming
Steven O’Hara, Rocky Slavin · 2019
Software Engineering tools today are hampered by weaknesses in parsing and analysis tools. For example, there are no standard repositories of grammars for the most popular programming languages. If an organization has software written in Python, Java, Bash, SQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and so on, there is no readily available mechanism to parse and analyze all of the software in a unified manner. This paper describes a collection of tools for parsing and analyzing many different languages, including legacy languages like COBOL and Fortran. The primary goal is scalability; dealing with a single programming language and a limited number of programs is far simpler than dealing with millions of lines of code written in many different languages.