Martin Ward's Home Page

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On the web since 21st July 1995

[photo]

Welcome

I am a Christian and Reader in Software Engineering and Royal Society Industry Fellow at De Montfort University, working with the Software Technology Research Laboratory. I am also Chief Technical Officer at Software Migrations Ltd.

My email address used to be: Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk, but is now: martin@gkc.org.uk or Martin.Ward@smltd.com

Mirrors

This web site is mirrored in the following locations:

My publications.

The FermaT Transformation Engine, an industrial-strength program transformation system.

My software available for download.

G.K. Chesterton Web Site. My aim is to collect copies of all of Chesterton's works which are currently available as etexts.

The usual pictures.

Memories of C. S. Lewis (13.0MB) An address by Lewis's friend and hire car driver Clifford Morris, originally broadcast by BBC Radio Oxford in 1971 mp3 version (18.0MB). Speex version, (4.5MB, quality=2). See http://www.speex.org for details on the Speex speech encoder.

The Gospel According to St. Mark: (The King James Version) A recording of the one man stage show by Alec McCowen. Part 1 (25MB), Part 2 (21MB), Part 3 (25MB), Part 4 (21MB).

Danial Kane music written and performed by Daniel Kane on the "Chapman stick", a 10 string fretted touchboard.

MSc in Software Engineering Slides from my part of the 2009 MSc in Software Engineering course at De Montfort University.

Research Interests

For the last 20 years or so I have been working on the theory and application of Program Transformations. I have developed a Wide Spectrum Language, called WSL, which is uniquely suitable for program analysis and transformation. In parallel with the language design has been the development of a transformation theory and proof methods, together with methods for program development and inverse engineering. The FermaT Transformation Engine is one result of this research and is now available for downloading under the GNU GPL.

A program transformation is an operation which modifies a program into a different form which has the same external behaviour. Both programs and specifications can be written in the same language (namely WSL), this means that transformations can be used to demonstrate that a given program is a correct implementation of a given specification, and to transform a low-level, hard-to-understand assembler language program into a more comprehensible high-level language program, or even to an abstract specification.

Inverse Engineering is the process of extracting high-level abstract specifications from source code using program transformations. It forms the basis for a formal method for reverse engineering from source code to specifications.

At Software Migrations I am working on the FermaT project: an industrial strength program transformation system targeted at reverse engineering, program comprehension and migration between programming languages. The system is currently being used in several migration projects to translate IBM 370 and Intel x86 Assembler modules into equivalent readable and maintainable C and COBOL programs.