Home // COMPUTATION TOOLS 2010, The First International Conference on Computational Logics, Algebras, Programming, Tools, and Benchmarking // View article

Euclides - A JavaScript to PostScript Translator

Authors:
Martin Strobl
Christoph Schinko
Torsten Ullrich
Dieter W. Fellner

Keywords: PostScript; JavaScript; translator; transpiler

Abstract:
Offering an easy access to programming languages that are difficult to approach directly dramatically reduces the inhibition threshold. The Generative Modeling Language is such a language and can be described as being similar to Adobe's PostScript. A major drawback of all PostScript dialects is their unintuitive reverse Polish notation, which makes both - reading and writing - a cumbersome task. A language should offer a structured and intuitive syntax in order to increase efficiency and avoid frustration during the creation of code. To overcome this issue, we present a new approach to translate JavaScript code to GML automatically. While this translation is basically a simple infix-to-postfix notation rewrite for mathematical expressions, the correct translation of control flow structures is a non-trivial task, due to the fact that there is no concept of 'goto' in the PostScript language and its dialects. The main contribution of this work is the complete translation of JavaScript into a PostScript dialect including all control flow statements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete translator.

Pages: 14 to 21

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2010

Publication date: November 21, 2010

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4170

ISBN: 978-1-61208-112-0

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 21, 2010 to November 26, 2010