Subject: [pem-list] PEM Talk Vadim Zaytsev, 16 december
From: Bas Basten 
To: pem-list 
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:13:43 +0100 (CET)

Dear all,

You are cordially invited for our next PEM Talk on December 16, by Dr.
Vadim Zaytsev. Dr. Zaytsev recently joined SWAT (SEN1) right
after defending his thesis titled “Recovery, Convergence and
Documentation of Languages”. The thesis reports on topical advances on
the field of software language engineering. The presentation on
Thursday will carefully highlight its most important methodologies and
deliverables in order to make connections to Rascal and adjacent
development topics and to establish the foundation for further
collaboration with the rest of SWAT.

The basic premise of the work was to treat any language, including
programming languages, modelling languages, data definition languages,
transformation languages, program libraries and application
programming interfaces, using similar technology. It is common to
define such a language by means of a formal grammar, which makes any
tool implicitly or explicitly based on such a grammar, grammarware.
Within the scope of this research, a “tool” is also treated as general
as possible, making artefacts like language documents also appear as
grammarware, not as a neglectable external textual addition. In
practice, many intentionally different grammars may co-exist for one
language and be stored in vastly different forms and formats. Such
grammars need to be recovered and then converged in order to reverse
engineer their real relationships with one another. Knowing and being
able to express such relationships exactly and explicitly may provide
evidence for correctness of mappings, data bindings, implementations,
third party tool compliance and dialect coverage. Using language
engineering methods at many moments in the evolution of a language can
provide considerable benefits.

For those who wish to become acquainted with the thesis, its text has
been made available at http://grammarware.net/text/2010/lci.pdf, and
the slides for “exposé”, a rather brief presentation directly
preceding a Dutch defence, can be found at
http://grammarware.net/slides/2010/expose.pdf.


Location: Room L016, CWI
Time: December 16, 13:00 hrs

Hope to see you all there.

Best regards,
Bas Basten