Abstract
The recognition of familiar computational structures in a program can help an experienced programmer to understand a program. Automating this recognition process will facilitate many tasks that require program understanding, e.g., maintenance, translation, and debugging. This paper describes a prototype recognition system which demonstrates the feasibility of automating program recognition. The prototype system automatically identifies occurrences of stereotyped algorithmic fragments and data structures, called clichés, in programs. It does so even though the clichés may be expressed in a wide range of syntactic forms and may be in the midst of unfamiliar code. Based on the known behaviors of these clichés and the relationships between them, the system generates a hierarchical description of a plausible design of the program. It does this systematically and exhaustively, using a parsing technique. This work is built on two previous advances: a graphical, programming-language-independent representation for programs, called the Plan Calculus, and an efficient graph parsing algorithm.
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