An XML C Source Code Interchange Format for CASE Tools

Abstract

We propose an XML C source code representation to support developing CASE tools. Since source code is a main artifact of software development, most CASE tools have some features related to source code editor, static analyzer, profiler, etc. To develop such tools, detailed information related to source code is needed. However, it is quite difficult to reuse program analysis features because they do not have common interfaces even for parsing and data/control-flow analysis that are most common features for such CASE tools. To address this issue, we focus on XML as an intermediate representation for source code information. Existing XML representations only represent structure of syntax trees and lack some important information required for CASE tools. We propose two models for representing source code, one is for intra-file information, which consists of syntax structure, flow, and type information, the other is for inter-file relation, which is cross-reference information. We also introduce CASE tools with our representation and demonstrate the efficacy in CASE tool development. To evaluate the efficacy, we show that a coding rule checker and a cross-referencer can be easily implemented using common XML processing libraries such as XSLT and XPath.