P2R Implementation of Processing in Racket Hugo Correia
[email protected] Instituto Superior T´ecnico University of Lisbon Abstract. Programming languages are being introduced in several ar- eas of expertise, including design and architecture. Processing is an ex- ample of one of these languages that was created to teach architects and designers how to program. In spite of offering a wide set of features, Pro- cessing does not support the use of traditional computer-aided design applications, which are heavily used in the architecture industry. Rosetta is a generative design tool based on the Racket language that attempts to solve this problem. Rosetta provides a novel approach to de- sign creation, offering a set of programming languages that generate de- signs in different computer-aided design applications. However, Rosetta does not support Processing. Therefore, the goal is to add Processing to Rosetta's language set, offering architects that know Processing, an alternative solution that supports computer-aided design applications. In order to achieve this goal, a source-to-source compiler that translates Processing into Racket will be developed. This will also give the Racket community the ability to use Processing in the Racket environment, and, at the same time, will allow the Processing community to take advantage of Racket's libraries and development environment. In this report, an analysis of different language implementation mecha- nisms will be presented, focusing on the different steps of the compilation phase, as well as higher-level solutions, including Language Workbenches. In order to gain insight of source-to-source compiler creation, relevant existing source-to-source compilers are presented.