Program Learning Using Static Information and Dynamic Program Execution Slices

Nowadays, we can easily obtain a copy of practically any used program in our open source community for learning. However, the reality is that the level of such practically used programs is often complex and of such a large scale so that it is not as easy to understand them as one might expect. We believe that we do need some kind of environment to help the learner read and understand programs. Learning programs is necessary for other reasons such as program maintenance, reuse of programs. In this research, we built a model to use for program understanding. Using it, we examined possible ways of supporting program learning. Based on that, the objective of this paper is to present our efforts at developing a program learning environment, which helps narrow down the scope of a program to facilitate reading and understanding it while finding the differences of such dynamic information, as found in the program execution history, and also provide an environment in which the learner can use static information. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed program learning environment through experiments.