Robust algorithmic binding to arbitrary fragment of program code

Abstract

When solving a task, a programmer actively interacts with a finite set of code fragments. The information about their locations is important for quick navigation, for other developers, and as a kind of documentation. Integrated development environments (IDEs) provide tools for marking code fragments with labels, displaying lists of labels, and using these labels for quick navigation. However, they often lose the correspondence between the label and the marked place when the code is edited, in particular when changes are made outside the IDE. In previous works, the authors propose a tool to be integrated into various IDEs for “binding” to large syntactic entities of a program and building a markup that is robust to code editing. The description of the marked element is built on the basis of the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the program. Later it is used to algorithmically search for the element in an edited code. The search has a success rate from 99 to 100%. This article aims at robust algorithmic binding to an arbitrary section of the code. For binding to a single-line code fragment, we propose an extension of the model describing the marked fragment, and an additional search algorithm. We also propose an algorithm for embedding nodes corresponding to multi-line fragments in an AST. We show that the correctness of the AST is not violated by these embeddings. Bindings to randomly selected lines were made in the code of three large C# projects. Manual check of these lines search results in the edited code has confirmed that the bindings are robust to code editing.