Proposed Software Description Language for Representing Program Logic in XML

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, grade: none, , course: Information Technology , language: English, abstract: This thesis proposes a software description language to represent the source code ofC++, Java, and VB.NET in the Extensible Markup Language. The similarity ofsemantics between these languages enables representing the source code in a form suchthat both, the source code and logic can be easily shared and reused between theselanguages. By performing semantic and syntactic comparison between C++, Java and VB.NET, theproposed language has been designed to include the similar and identical features andlanguage constructs. For every adopted language construct, a corresponding construct inthe proposed language has been developed. The validity of the proposed language has been investigated and proved theoretically byconducting a semantic comparison between the three languages and experimentally bydeveloping applications to convert source code from Java into the proposed languageand from the proposed language into VB.NET. Validation cases have been designed toinclude various programs such as sorting, searching and also to include the most usedprogramming constructs in the three languages. Source code of the validation caseshave been converted from Java into the proposed language, and from the proposedlanguage into VB.NET. Java and VB.NET programs of the validation cases have beenexecuted and results compared. The results were identical for all conductedexperiments. The proposed language has some major benefits in the conversion betweenprogramming languages as an intermediary language. It may also be used in theintegration between systems as it enables sharing of programming logic at runtime. Existing integration technologies only enable the sharing of data between varioussystems. This thesis is not concerned with adapting programming languages libraries andfunctions. Future work may extend the proposed language to adapt different featuressuch as pointers and multiple-inheritance into the proposed language.