A Catalog of Patterns for Program Generation

Generation of source code is becoming a more and more important tool for software engineering, especially in the context of model drien development and MDA. While it is possible in theory to „generate code“ just using printf, this approach is insufficient in all but the most trivial cases. However, there are several alternatives. This paper introduces a set of patterns that describe the most commonly used source code generation techniques. That can be used for model transformations, model-to-source generation or source code transformation. It also contains large amount of examples that show how different tools realize the patterns.