PAT: a knowledge-based program analysis tool

The authors address the use of knowledge-based techniques in providing high-level support for program understanding and debugging activities. An intelligent program analysis/debugging tool, called PAT, is described which is expected to provide human-expert-level assistance to programmers in general program understanding and debugging tasks. PAT is characterized by its use of a knowledge base of coding and debugging heuristics represented as program plans. With the help of the encoded expert knowledge, this tool comprehends a given program without a separate specification from the programmer or an execution of the program. PAT then generates paraphrases about the intentions implied in the given code and diagnoses bugs that are commonly related to those intentions