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Query by outlines: a new paradigm to help manage programs

Author:

Françoise BalmasAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 24, Issue 5

Pages 86 - 94

https://doi.org/10.1145/381788.316185

Published: 01 September 1999 Publication History

Abstract

We propose a new paradigm to query information about programs, namely query by outlines. This paradigm relies on an outlining model that conceptually describe units of code according to the computations they perform. Outlines are automatically constructed by our system PRISME for C and Lisp programs. Currently, both our model and our system are restricted to loops.QBO is a prototype tool that implements the query by outline paradigm. It proposes to browse the loops of a program directly through their outline, and allows to restrict these loops to browse with queries expressed as constraints on the outlines. Thus it enables to answer questions such as "where is this variable modified?", "where is this kind of computation performed?", or "are there many places where this computation is performed?".In this paper, we sketch our outlining model, introduce QBO and argue that query by outline is a helpful paradigm to manage programs.

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Cited By

Rupakheti CHou D(2010)An Abstraction-Oriented, Path-Based Approach for Analyzing Object Equality in JavaProceedings of the 2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering10.1109/WCRE.2010.30(205-214)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/WCRE.2010.30
Balmas F(1999)QBO: a query tool specially developed to explore programsSixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (Cat. No.PR00303)10.1109/WCRE.1999.806966(270-279)Online publication date: 1999
https://doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.1999.806966

Index Terms

Query by outlines: a new paradigm to help manage programs
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 24, Issue 5

Sept. 1999

109 pages

ISSN:0163-5948

DOI:10.1145/381788

Chairman:
David Notkin
Univ. of washington, Seattle

Issue’s Table of Contents

PASTE '99: Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering
September 1999
109 pages
ISBN:1581131372
DOI:10.1145/316158
Chairmen:
William Griswold,
Susan Horwitz

Copyright © 1999 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 1999

Published in SIGSOFT Volume 24, Issue 5

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Cited By

Rupakheti CHou D(2010)An Abstraction-Oriented, Path-Based Approach for Analyzing Object Equality in JavaProceedings of the 2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering10.1109/WCRE.2010.30(205-214)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/WCRE.2010.30
Balmas F(1999)QBO: a query tool specially developed to explore programsSixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (Cat. No.PR00303)10.1109/WCRE.1999.806966(270-279)Online publication date: 1999
https://doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.1999.806966

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