Using Standard ML in Software Maintenance: A Promising Approach

In this paper, we will talk about our experiences with implementing a rst set of tools for our software maintenance project, called AEMES 2 which is currently being developed at the Institut f ur Informatik of the University of Zurich, using the functional programming language Standard ML. We will rst talk about some experiences we made with this fairly new programming language and then go on to sketch the ideas that are behind our implementation of a functional COBOL parser/recognizer. We will further elaborate on why we had to introduce gross-grain scanning when dealing with COBOL programs and then talk about our cross referencer. The paper closes with conclusions and an outlook on our future work.