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Language Evolution in Practice: The History of GMF

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Software Language Engineering (SLE 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5969))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching b. München, Germany

    Markus Herrmannsdoerfer & Daniel Ratiu

  2. Institut für Informatik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Guido Wachsmuth

Authors
  1. Markus Herrmannsdoerfer
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  2. Daniel Ratiu
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  3. Guido Wachsmuth
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Software Engineering and Technology, Univeristy of Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, 5612 AZ, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Mark van den Brand

  2. School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, T9S 3A3, Athabasca, AB, Canada

    Dragan Gašević

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, P.O. Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

    Jeff Gray

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Herrmannsdoerfer, M., Ratiu, D., Wachsmuth, G. (2010). Language Evolution in Practice: The History of GMF . In: van den Brand, M., Gašević, D., Gray, J. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5969. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12107-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12107-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12106-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12107-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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