symbolic python

[Ira Baxter]

Kragen Sitaker <kragen at pobox.com> wrote in message news:<838z5xtcla.fsf at panacea.canonical.org>...
> Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:
> > Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> > > "Ira Baxter" <idbaxter at semdesigns.com> writes:
> > > > DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit.
> > > It sounds very interesting.  How can I get a copy?
> > 
> > No doubt by sending them a pile of money.  :-)  (Given the customer
> > list mentioned, it would probably be a large pile.)

It isn't cheap by most people's standards.
But then, we don't sell tens of thousand of copies,
and so the cost must reflect the engineering effort
and volume.  And we (at least) think it is well worth the price
in terms of time saved for the tasks which it does well.

> I looked around the web site for a while without finding any
> information about how to do that, so I posted the above message.  Ira
> Baxter responded in private, saying it "was available commercially",
> and suggesting that I look at the web site for more details.
> 
> This all leaves a bad taste in my mouth; the Web site makes a point of
> explaining that the information they would like to sell me was
> developed with my tax dollars.

And frankly, so was the basic VLSI technology that powers the computers
you seem happy to pay for.

Yes, we did get some tax dollars to help build an early,
*demo* version of the technology.
And, like most other beneficiaries of US Government
Research grants, we have put a huge amount of effort into
it above and beyond what the original grants provided.

> > no support for Python is (yet) mentioned in the list of supported
> > languages.

That's because our tools are designed to accept langauge definitions
easily.   A Python grammar would take only a few days to develop.

If you want to transform Python symbolically, DMS will do the
job very well, and I don't see many alternatives out there.

-- IDB