A Patent has been awarded as of July 2017, covering our new approach to computer language parsing using Reflection. It was handled by Silicon Valley patent attorney Doug Weller.
American and European businesses today have billions of lines of production software that are written in legacy computer languages like COBOL, RPG, PL/I, Fortran and Natural. They are highly motivated to modernize their software, but the process is either extremely expensive or extremely low quality. The few tools available are not designed for complex software systems that can have tens of millions of lines of code in them.
This patent is focused on the first step in an application modernization project, which is parsing and analyzing all the existing software. There are normally many different languages, computers, and processes in place and often there are no experts and little to no documentation.
We have invented a new way to parse computer programming languages without a traditional grammar, exploiting a programming technique called Reflection. The earliest parsers simply read through a computer program and processed it one character at a time. In 1970, YACC was invented at AT&T and is the basis for nearly all modern parsers. It is a declarative way of describing a computer programming language that generates an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).
This invention ("Program" + "grammar" = "Programmar") allows the representation of the grammar as a computer program itself, such that the semantics of a legacy programming language can be captured, in addition to the syntax. For example, the PERFORM verb in COBOL can be expressed as a Java class, and the elements within the PERFORM statement will contain references to the paragraphs and variables used, not just the names of them.