Frequently Asked Questions

Installation

Q: I get errors when compiling Stratego programs or when running compiled Stratego programs.
A: If you've carefully followed the installation instructions and you are still having problems, please file a bug report. Make sure to specify your configuration (OS, gcc version, Stratego version), include the error message and if posisble try to reduce to problem to a small piece of code.

Mac OS X

Q: Does Stratego/XT support Mac OS X?
A: Yes, Stratego/XT works on Mac OS X. We provide binary distributions.

Microsoft Windows

Q: Does Stratego/XT support Microsoft Windows?
Yes, Stratego/XT works on Microsoft Windows + Cygwin. We provide binary distributions. Recently, we have started on support for native Microsoft Windows (i.e. without Cygwin). We currently provide binary archives of JavaFront and Stratego Libraries for native Microsoft Windows.

Q: How do I compile Stratego/XT on Microsoft Windows using Cygwin?
A: You can follow the normal installation instructions, with a minor twist. Cygwin prints lots of warnings about 'description fields' when compiling the Stratego Libraries. They are harmless, but this can go on for minutes, so this might confuse you. To disable the warnings, set CFLAGS to -O2 before configuring Stratego/XT. By setting the CFLAGS, configure will itself not initialize it to -O2 -g, where the -g argument is the problematic one.

Q: How do I compile the Stratego Libraries on Microsoft Windows using MinGW?
A: Install the aterm library, and for the Stratego Libraries use the configure option --with-std=C99 and everything should work like a charm.

Stratego interpreter

Q: How do I proceed to write Stratego code that's both interpretable and compilable? Is that a goal for the interpreter that this is possible ?
A: Yes, the compiler and the interpreter work on the same language. You can consider the list of commands in a script as the main strategy of a specification. There should be no difference in semantics between the compiler and the interpreter. Except for the fact that there is a definition before use regime in the script itself (not in modules imported in the script). That is, that is defined in the script can only be used (in a command) after it has been declared.

Debugging

Q: How do I get more debugging info ? The tools are awfully quiet unless I chock my code full of debug invocations. Can I somehow set up an 'exception handler' that shows the traversed stack and line number (or something similar) when a rewriting fails miserably?

A: See debugging techniques

Stratego language

Q: What is the difference between a strategy and a rule?
A: See rules versus strategies

Q: In what ways can variables be bound?
A: A variable is only bound during matching. That is, while applying a pattern match ?t to the subject term. All constructs that bind variables, ultimately use this pattern matching construct to bind variables.

Dynamic rules

Q: I get unexpected behaviour with two different dynamic rules with the same label.
A: If you are not using Stratego/XT 0.14 or later please upgrade. For more information see dynamic rule semantics.

Stratego Libary

Q: collect removes duplicates, is there collect-with-duplicates?
A: Yes, there is. The collect strategy is an alias of collect-om. collect-om has a variant that takes a strategy argument that is used to combine intermediate results. If you pass conc instead of union, then duplicates will not be removed.

Q: Is it possible to redirect the stderr of process to a file in Stratego?
A: Yes, this works exactly the same a redirection in C. Example:

    module example
    imports posix-file char-io

    strategies

      main =
          <open> "error.txt" => fd
        ; <dup2> (fd, <STDERR_FILENO>)
        ; <debug> "bla bla bla 1"
        ; <fputs> ("bla bla bla 2", <stderr-stream>)
        ; <close> fd

See 'man dup2' for more information.