Rapid Programming with Graph Rewrite Rules1

Graphs play an important role within many areas of computer science and rule-based languages are more and more used to describe complex transformation or inference processes. Nevertheless, their combination in the form of graph rewriting systems were more or less unknown among computer scientists for a long time. Nowadays, the situation is gradually improving with the appearance of a number of graph rewriting system implementations. Currently, the multi-paradigm language PROGRES is the most expressive implemented graph rewriting language. It has the flavor of a visual database definition and programming language and combines the advantages of attributed (graph) grammars with rule-oriented as well as imperative programming. An integrated set of tools supports editing, analyzing, and debugging of applications as well as translation into procedural programming languages (C, Modula-2).