From: Jurgen Vinju
To: Multiple recipients of list PEM <>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 18:52:23 +0200
Subject: PEM | 25.10.01 | M279

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   Dear COBOL friends,
   
   The story of COBOL transformation continues with Niels Veerman's
   results.
   
   This announcement can be found with links at
   <http://www.cwi.nl/htbin/jurgenv/pem/pem.cgi?1004004000>
   
        Restructuring Cobol Systems using Automatic Transformations
                                      
   Date:    25.10.01
   Time:    10:00
   Venue:   M279
   Speaker: Niels Veerman
   Title:   Restructuring Cobol Systems using Automatic Transformations

   Nowadays, one third of all software is written Cobol. These systems
   are usually built long ago and modified by multiple programmers. This
   makes them highly unstructured. Maintenance costs of these systems can
   range from 50% to 80% of the total software investments.
   
   I have been working at SIG for the last six months to write my
   Master's thesis. I continued on the work done by Hans Zaadnoordijk. He
   migrated a set of Cobol restructuring rules to a newer version of the
   ASF+SDF Meta-Environment. The restructuring is based on goto-removal
   and isolation of components. The transformation rules were developed
   by Sellink, Sneed and Verhoef. Zaadnoordijk also implemented a
   coordination algorithm that +can apply all rules to a large Cobol
   system.
   
   I focused on improving both the rules and the algorithm. The rules are
   now more stable, generalized and tested. I simplified the algorithm
   siginificantly and it is a lot faster. More source code can be
   restructured now. A Cobol system of 70 thousand lines of code can be
   transformed within three hours, and 75% of the 2867 goto statements
   are removed (was: 59%).
   
   Have a nice day.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
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     _________________________________________________________________