Pretty-printing for software reengineering

Automatic software reengineerings change or repair existing software systems. They are usually tailor-made for a specific customer and language dependent. Maintaining similar reengineerings for multiple customers and different language dialects might therefore soon become problematic unless advanced language technology is being used. Generic pretty-printing is part of such technology and is the subject of this paper. We discuss specific pretty-print aspects of software reengineering such as fulfilling customer-specific format conventions, preserving existing layout, and producing multiple output formats. In addition, we describe pretty-print techniques that help to reduce maintenance effort of tailor-made reengineerings supporting multiple language dialects. Applications, such as COLBOL reengineering and SDL documentation generation show that our techniques, implemented in the generic pretty-printer GPP, are feasible.