Symbolic Analysis as a Basis for Program Comprehension : Symbolic analysis introduces symbols as atomistic hybrid objects, which create interpretations with each other to be used for program comprehe

ISBN-13: 9783639168334 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 300 str.

Erkki Laitila

Opis

Research on program comprehension is important,because the amount of source code in mission-criticalapplications is increasing world-wide.As a solution for that challenge, a methodology withfour stages is introduced. The first stage,GrammarWare, transforms the program into a symbolicform to function as a construction for the model, asthe second stage, ModelWare. For the model the ideaof an "atom" is presented to combine the benefits ofobjects for abstracting, and expressiveness of Prolog for tailoring and formalizing the model.The third stage, SimulationWare, implements asymbolic abstract machine, comparable withtraditional Turing machine. With its computationmodel it enables symbolic analysis, which iscomparable with dynamic analysis, but has a ratherflexible pragmatics. The last stage, KnowledgeWare,is aimed for collecting knowledge for codeinspection, error detection and verification ofcurrent operations.The methodology is programmed with Visual Prolog andimplemented in a tool, which enables the handling ofJava code. The practical goal for the methodology isintelligent support for maintenance tasks.

O autorze

Dr Erkki Laitila has a long experience as a computer engineer
from many companies like Nokia. Since 1999 he has concentrated in
reverse engineering using hybrid programming
technology to connect object-oriented paradigm and logic for
expressing semantics of formal languages as symbols. Symbolic
analysis has much potential to be commercialized, too.