Magic Literals in Pharo
| Autor: | Delplanque, Julien, Ducasse, Stéphane, Zaitsev, Oleksandr |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution (RMOD), Inria Lille - Nord Europe, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille - UMR 9189 (CRIStAL), Centrale Lille-Université de Lille-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Centrale Lille-Université de Lille-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) |
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | IWST19-International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies IWST19-International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies, Aug 2019, Köln, Germany |
| Popis: | International audience; Literals are constant values (numbers, strings, etc.) used in the source code. Magic literals are the ones used without a clear explanation of their meaning. Presence of such literals harms source code readability, decreases its modularity, and encourages code duplication. Identifying magic literals is not straightforward. A literal can be considered self-explanatory in one context and magic in another. We need a heuristic to help developers spot magic literals. In this article, we study and characterize the literals in Pharo. We implemented a heuristic to detect magic literals and integrated it as a code critic rule for System Browser and Critics Browser in Pharo 7. We run our heuristic on 112,500 Pharo methods which reported 23,292 magic literals spread across 8,986 methods. We manually validated our approach on a random subset of 100 methods and found that 62% of the reported literals in those methods are indeed magic. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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