Semantic Code Browsing
| Autor: | José F. Morales, Isabel Garcia-Contreras, Manuel V. Hermenegildo |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
FOS: Computer and information sciences
Source code Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Static program analysis 0102 computer and information sciences 02 engineering and technology Query language computer.software_genre 01 natural sciences Theoretical Computer Science Internal documentation Artificial Intelligence 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Code (cryptography) Code generation media_common Informática Computer Science - Programming Languages Programming language Computational Theory and Mathematics Object code 010201 computation theory & mathematics Hardware and Architecture 020201 artificial intelligence & image processing KPI-driven code analysis computer Software Programming Languages (cs.PL) |
| Zdroj: | Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, ISSN 1471-0684, 2016, Vol. 16, No. 5-6 Archivo Digital UPM instname |
| Popis: | Programmers currently enjoy access to a very high number of code repositories and libraries of ever increasing size. The ensuing potential for reuse is however hampered by the fact that searching within all this code becomes an increasingly difficult task. Most code search engines are based on syntactic techniques such as signature matching or keyword extraction. However, these techniques are inaccurate (because they basically rely on documentation) and at the same time do not offer very expressive code query languages. We propose a novel approach that focuses on querying for semantic characteristics of code obtained automatically from the code itself. Program units are pre-processed using static analysis techniques, based on abstract interpretation, obtaining safe semantic approximations. A novel, assertion-based code query language is used to express desired semantic characteristics of the code as partial specifications. Relevant code is found by comparing such partial specifications with the inferred semantics for program elements. Our approach is fully automatic and does not rely on user annotations or documentation. It is more powerful and flexible than signature matching because it is parametric on the abstract domain and properties, and does not require type definitions. Also, it reasons with relations between properties, such as implication and abstraction, rather than just equality. It is also more resilient to syntactic code differences. We describe the approach and report on a prototype implementation within the Ciao system. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP. Paper presented at the 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2016), New York City, USA, 16-21 October 2016, 15 pages, LaTeX, 4 PDF figures, 2 tables |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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