XML Externalization Built into Compiler Front-ends Using A Parser Generator

This paper describes XML externalization built into compiler front-ends and its application to quick reverse engineering tool development. A parser generator MoJay was developed to build XML externalization functionality into compiler front-ends. After replacing the original parser generator with MoJay, generating a parser using it, and modifying a few lines of source code in the compiler, we were able to obtain a special compiler that externalizes three types of information in the form of XML documents, namely, lexical information, syntactic information, and parse tree. The syntactic information was applied to develop a reverse engineering tool for C#. The tool shows a performance penalty from the viewpoint of the generated XML document size. However, even with a storage penalty, the quick development is a far superior option. Index Terms — parser generator, reverse engineering tool, XML, C#