HSML, the Hot Spot Markup Language, is an ultra-high level executable specification language designed for concisely specifying source code hot spots of all kinds. Each HSML rule specifies the syntactic class of the items to be marked as hot using a nonterminal of the target language grammar, and the semantic conditions under which such items are to be marked using an algebraic expression on the design properties of the item. Conditions can include restrictions on syntactic structure (patterns), design recovered semantic properties (queries on the design database), and semantic properties induced by other markup rules. HSML has been used in industrial practice to specify source code hot spots for the Year 2000 and a wide range of other application maintenance tasks on systems implemented in Cobol, PI/I and RPG. In this paper we introduce the basic concepts of HSML and demonstrate its use in real software maintenance tasks.
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