Software Artifacts Recovery using Abstract Regular Expressions

Program comprehension and artifacts recovery of legacy software systems is assisted by tools that match patterns on the source code of different programming languages and text files. There are different capable pattern matching tools including lexical, syntactic and semantic restricted by limitations. The lexical pattern matchers have been given excellent performance, known for ease of use and abstract regular expression capabilities. Despite the high degree of performance in pattern matching, these matchers have limited vocabulary that restricts the eclectic restructuring of software components. The syntactic pattern matcher provides precision but may sacrifice the performance, robustness, or power. It is imperative to use the superlative features of both the lexical and syntactic tools that ensure performance, precision and high degree of innovative vocabulary. This paper present a lexical based Pattern matching technique using abstract regular expressions and design recovery tool(DRT) incorporating superlative features of lexical and syntactic pattern matching tools to extract artifacts from legacy software applications.