Say if you want to transform language A to language B. (Seen in the MDSD “Rewrite Entities to yUML” assignment.) Then you need to import at the very least the signatures of both languages.

I’m not entirely sure how to do this (suggestions most welcome), but some options are:

• Use Eclipse’s concept of project references and automatically import all referenced projects. Would require extra work to not break builds outside of Eclipse.

• Require users to add “-I” paths in the build.main.xml. But what would the paths look like? We don’t want absolute file system paths. Would require extra work to work with the editor.

• Just add all projects in the workspace to a global namespace, causing various kinds of problems.

• Some kind of wizard. But then the Eclipse “referenced projects” UI would probably be better, as it already checks if projects exist, can be used to inspect existing references, and is already known to some Eclipse users.

See also Spoofax/40: Make it easier to reuse editor service definitions

Submitted by Lennart Kats on 6 May 2010 at 14:55

Currently we’re considering revising the Stratego language to use packages that represent a group of files instead of the current file-based module system. Then you’d be able to import an entire package, which could be in another project, instead of having to deal with file-based imports and setting import paths. This should solve issues like Spoofax/214.