Reasoning Systems, Inc. markets the Refine Language Tools, a family of interactive, extensible workbenches for analyzing and reengineering code in programming languages including Ada, C, COBOL, and FORTRAN. One of the most attractive features of these tools is that they are customizable to suit any particular version of the programming language. Each Refine Language Tool comes with a fully documented reengineering API (application programming interface) for building customizations. Refine Language Tools use an intuitive X Window System based graphical interface and provide capabilities including: (i) Interactive source code navigation, (ii) Generation of set/use, structure chart, and identifier definition reports, (iii) Online viewing and Postscript printing of all reports, (iv) Consistent graphical user interface and a standardized report format, and (v) Ability to export design information to forward-engineering CASE tools.
Newcomb and Kotik [7] describe a reengineering tool for automatically transforming a system written in COBOL, a procedural language, into a functionally comparable object-oriented system. The tool is built upon two members of the family of Refine Language Tools, namely the Software Refinery, a transformation programming system, and the COBOL R*Workbench, a highly hybridized version of Refine/COBOL. They also describe the transformation process from procedural to the hierarchical object-oriented state-machine model. The method does not attempt to build class hierarchies, one of the most important aspects of object-orientation.
Strictly speaking, Rigi is a reverse engineering tool, but the Refine tools are reengineering tools that include reverse engineering phases.
Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Fri Oct 25 00:55:30 CST 1996