Analogical representations of programs

In order to enhance the process of discovering and understanding unknown programs, we developed Zeugma: a programming environment for the construction, development and experimentation of analogical representations of programs. We consider an analogical representation of programs as a representation where the different parts, for example houses in a city or spiders on a web, illustrate, in an analogical manner, particular aspects of the program-its composition, its behavior or the underlying algorithm-according to a user determined task like maintenance, optimization, program understanding and algorithm animation. Zeugma includes a special sub-system permitting to dynamically define desired representations by specifying formal relationships between chosen representations and the chosen aspects of the program under consideration. It is these relations, which permit Zeugma to automatically generate corresponding static or dynamic representations.