tags:

views:

90

answers:

1

I was wondering if there is something similar to GCC_XML for C#3; basically a way to represent a program's entire syntactic structure in XML.

Once the representation is created, I was hoping to parse it into an XDocument and interpret or query it from there.

Are there tools out there for this?

+1  A: 

The DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit can do this with C# 2/3/4.

DMS has compiler accurate parsers for C# (as well as Java and many other languages).

It automatically builds full Abstract Syntax Trees for whatever it parses. Each AST node is stamped with file/line/column for the token that represents that start of that node, and the final column can be computed by a DMS API call. It attaches comments to tree nodes so they aren't lost. DMS can also regenerate valid code from the AST, or from a modified AST; this enables it to be used for code modification or generation.

It has a built-in option to generate XML from the ASTs, complete with node type, source position (as above), and any associated literal value. The command line call is:

 run DMSDomainParser ++XML  <path_to_your_file>

DMS itself provides a vast amount of infrastructure for manipulating the ASTs it builds: traversing, pattern matching (against patterns coded essentially in source form), source-to-source transforms.

It has control flow, data flow, points-to analysis, global call graphs for C, COBOL and Java; that's all coming for C#.

DMS was designed to be a better solution than XML for manipulating such code.

Ira Baxter