About The Program

Kimwitu++ is the successor to Kimwitu. Like Kimwitu, it is a tool for processing trees (i.e. terms). It is a meta tool: Kimwitu++ can be used for generating software - especially when building compilers. Kimwitu++ has its own input language, which allows the definition for the tree structure and of functions operating on the tree. It uses the input to generate a number of C++ files, which are then bound to a program using the C++ compiler.

Kimwitu++ can be easily combined with parser generators like lex and yacc. While the parser deals with processing the grammar rules, kimwitu++ deals with creating an abstract syntax tree. In further passes, this tree can be used to generate target code. These passes can be implemented in the same program or a different one - kimwitu++ supports saving the tree into files.

For processing the tree, Kimwitu++ supports two mechanisms: unparse rules (for code generation), and rewrite rules (for transformations). Each rule can be tailored to a specific node structure using pattern matching; all rules together are applied to the tree recursively. To support different rules for the same kind of node (in different application contexts), Kimwitu++ supports the definition of views.

Inside the rules, Kimwitu++ allows to integrate C++ code; it also provides some extensions to C++. For each node type, a class is generated, which can be extended with user-defined methods.

Perhaps you cannot really make yourself a picture yet, so we have prepared a little example: A calculator that accepts RPN with the fundamental operations as well as integers and variables and processes them.

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Michael Piefel
Created 20/8/99, last change 19/04/2007