Rascal is an experimental Domain specific language for metaprogramming

Metaprogramming

Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs as their data, or that do part of the work at compile time that would otherwise be done at runtime...

, such as Static code analysis

Static code analysis

Static program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed without actually executing programs built from that software In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of the source code and in the other cases some form of the object code...

, Program transformation

Program transformation

A program transformation is any operation that takes a computer program and generates another program. In many cases the transformed program is required to be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular formal semantics and in fewer cases the transformations result in programs...

 and implementation of Domain specific languages. It includes primitives from relational calculus

Relational calculus

Relational calculus consists of two calculi, the tuple relational calculus and the domain relational calculus, that are part of the relational model for databases and provide a declarative way to specify database queries...

 and term rewriting. Its syntax and semantics are based on procedural (imperative) and functional programming.

A publication introducing Rascal can be found in the proceedings of IEEE SCAM http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/SCAM.2009.28

See also

• ASF+SDF
• Stratego/XT
  Stratego/XT
  Stratego/XT is a language and toolset for constructing stand-alone program transformation systems.It combines the Stratego transformation language with the XT toolset of transformation components, providing a framework for constructing stand-alone...
  
  
• DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit
  DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit
  The DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is a proprietary set of program transformation tools available for automating custom source program analysis, modification, translation or generation of software systems for arbitrary mixtures of source languages for large scale software systems.DMS has been...
  
  
• ANTLR
  ANTLR
  In computer-based language recognition, ANTLR , or ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a parser generator that uses LL parsing. ANTLR is the successor to the Purdue Compiler Construction Tool Set , first developed in 1989, and is under active development...
  
  
• Source-to-source compiler
  Source-to-source compiler
  A source-to-source compiler is a type of compiler that takes a high level programming language as its input and outputs a high level language. For example, an automatic parallelizing compiler will frequently take in a high level language program as an input and then transform the code and annotate...
  
  
• Static code analysis
  Static code analysis
  Static program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed without actually executing programs built from that software In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of the source code and in the other cases some form of the object code...