A cognitive approach to program understanding

Author

Bertels, Koen ; Vanneste, Philip ; Backer, Carlos De

Author_Institution

Namur Univ., Belgium

fYear

1993

fDate

21-23 May 1993

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

7

Abstract

A method of program understanding is presented, based on a cognitive model of programming knowledge, and incorporating the basic concepts, structures, and strategies used by human expert programmers. The approach involves the generation of a high-level description of the program with, as main advantages, the use of abstraction and robustness with respect to conceptual errors. The use of abstraction permits the transcending of any syntactical variation and allows focusing on the semantics. This also potentially allows the analysis of larger programs. The method can cope with erroneous code, and can generate a precise description of the bug(s) involved. The method is useful for integration in a tutoring system for programming

Keywords

program debugging; program diagnostics; systems analysis; cognitive model; conceptual errors; erroneous code; high-level description; human expert programmers; program analysis; program debugging; program description generation; program tutoring; program understanding; programming knowledge; semantics; syntactical variation; tutoring system; Calculus; Computer bugs; Error correction; Flow graphs; Humans; Libraries; Programming profession; Robustness; Testing; Usability;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reverse Engineering, 1993., Proceedings of Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Baltimore, MD

Print_ISBN

0-8186-3780-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WCRE.1993.287784

Filename

287784