iMatix Corporation

Summary

Libero is a code generator and a programming tool. Libero writes code to solve a diagrammed problem.. Your apps are simpler to build, more resilient, and easier to comprehend. Libero’s underlying model is a finite-state machine.
Conditions The Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public Licence, either version 2 or any later version, allows you to redistribute and modify this code. This programme is supplied without warranty, including MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, to aid.

Introduction

The quality that motivates you to go to considerable lengths to reduce overall energy consumption. It forces you to build labor-saving programmes that others will find beneficial, as well as record your work so you don’t have to answer as many inquiries about it. Coding’s first major benefit.” Programming Perl, 1992, O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., The Start In 1982, I programmed games for money. I bypassed the DIY-from-an-old-TV-screen-and-a-hex-keypad human computer era and went straight to colour and sound. My first computer had 5K of RAM and a 25×22 colour video display. It may beep in three parts. My first piece of published work was an essay explaining how to change the video output to 30×33 (high-resolution!). I created sprite painters, sound and graphics assembly libraries, and languages to replace Basic. Anything that help me write my games faster and more effectively. I was sucked into the loop of writing tools to change the world I lived in before I knew what struck me.

I haven’t written a game in a long time, but I’ve kept working on tools. Libero is one of the greatest – it’s simple, clean, and portable, and it’s struck the spot so frequently that I feel it’s unjust to keep it to myself.

During the 1980s and 1990s, ideas for Libero emerged in Brussels, Belgium. I collaborated with Leif Svalgaard on what we now term a CASE tool – ETK – that allowed COBOL programmers to generate clean, portable code rather than the usual muck. We used finite state machine programming.. Compilers were the first practical programmes that employed finite state machines. In 1967, Peter Naur proposed a Turing machine technique to using FSMs in compilers to ease error checking. He continues, saying:

“The preceding exposition emphasised the Turing machine approach’s checking aspect. However, the ease with which arbitrary actions can be stated is also significant. Using this strategy, it is often able to avoid tests in individual actions to a surprising extent. We’ve found this to reduce the translation algorithm’s bulk and execution time.

ETK has an interactive editor for describing the program’s logic as an FSM. This method pushes you to consider the entire situation. You explain every possible scenario and how the programme should respond. The ultimate result resembles a flowchart, but with more arrows and fewer various types of boxes. The benefit of this method is that it allows you to abstract a complex problem using the limited semantics of an FSM. A FSM is less powerful but more useful than a structured programming approach for representing complex issues in the same way that a While statement is less powerful but more useful than a Goto The issue is not one of power,” In a typical state machine, these boxes are numbered and the programmer generates arrow tables. Making such a table by hand or, worse, putting it directly in the programme logic via GOTOs is a Bad Thing because it is practically impossible to maintain. Our ingenious solution was to directly build the magical tables as COBOL code from the textual description (called a “dialogue”). The original dialogue is easy to change and makes great (and accurate) documentation. I started consulting in 1992 and intended to use these tactics. I created a dialogue-style code generator for C because I was writing in it.I named this tool ‘Libero’ after the guy who does all the dirty work on the football/soccer field’s sidelines. My first real work involved a slew of TCP/IP clients and servers. Three years later, my maintenance person had only found one fault and was anxious to fix it. He claimed that the dialogues made them simple to comprehend and change.

This type of event convinced me that this instrument had significant usefulness. I’ve built a number of cute programmes that are useful for my own requirements but fail miserably in the real world. Libero is unique.

Libero’s first public version (1.7) used a schema to produce C code. I have ANSI C and multithreaded DEC/VMS schemas. After adding schemas for UNIX scripts, I posted version 2.0 to the Internet. I made the code-generator more generic after receiving lots of feedback. The current version 2.11 features many additional language schemas and fewer issues, as well as a front-end for Microsoft Windows.

I hope to keep going in both ways. Libero has evolved into a programme that allows you to easily transition between languages. First, accept state-machine programming. . This requires some work, but I hope the examples that follow will persuade you. Second, make this approach language-agnostic. You can write a C programme and then rewrite it in Perl without affecting the design.

A hypothetical development team might produce COBOL mainframe business programmes, Perl tools, C servers, Korn shell batch scripts, and Java Web clients. Instead of a team divided into domain specialists, you would have a team that loves a common design methodology and can rapidly take on each other’s work. In practise, this leads to a communality of programming style, which irritates language purists. However, I enjoy it when a COBOL programmer who only knows Libero looks at a C software written in Libero and exclaims, “But it looks like COBOL!”