A Purely Functional Combinator Language for Software Quality Assessment

Abstract

Quality assessment of open source software is becoming an important
and active research area. One of the reasons for this recent interest
is the consequence of Internet popularity. Nowadays, programming also
involves looking for the large set of open source libraries and tools
that may be reused when developing our software applications. In order
to reuse such open source software artifacts, programmers not only
need the guarantee that the reused artifact is certified, but also 
that independently developed artifacts can be easily combined into a
coherent piece of software.

In this paper we describe a domain specific language that allows
programmers to describe in an abstract level how software artifacts
can be combined into powerful software certification processes. This
domain specific language is the building block of a web-based,
open-source software certification portal. This paper introduces the
embedding of such domain specific language as combinator library
written in the Haskell programming language. The semantics of this
language is expressed via attribute grammars that are embedded in
Haskell, which provide a modular and incremental setting to define the
combination of software artifacts.