Recognizing a program´s design: a graph-parsing approach

Psychological experiments have shown that programmers tend to use the same structure over and over. The authors call these commonly used programming structures ´cliches´. They describe a prototype, the Recognizer, that automatically finds all occurrences of a given set of cliches in a program and builds a hierarchical description of the program in terms of the cliches it finds. The key to the Recognizer´s approach is a representation shift. Instead of looking for cliches directly in the source code, the Recognizer first translates the program into a language-independent, graphical representation called the Plan Calculus. The Plan Calculus is a program representation shared by all components of the Programmer´s Apprentice, an intelligent programming system. Thus, although the authors have demonstrated the Recognizer only on small Common Lisp programs, the underlying technology is language-independent.<>