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.
A grammar of a first programming language is represented in member fields and data types of object-oriented classes of a second programming language as an empty program semantic tree. A parser builds a new program semantic tree that represents source code written in the first programming language. The new program semantic tree is built by a reflection technique in which the member fields and data types of the object-oriented classes of the second programming language as set out in the empty program semantic tree are modified during the building of the new program semantic tree.