Toward a Constraint-Satisfaction Framework
For Evaluating Program-Understanding Algorithms
Steven Woods and
Alex Quilici.
Abstract
Different program understanding algorithms often use different
representational frameworks and take advantage of numerous
heuristic tricks. This situation makes it difficult to compare
these approaches and their performance. This paper addresses this
problem by proposing constraint satisfaction as a general framework
for describing program understanding algorithms, demonstrating how
to tranform a relatively complex existing program understanding
algorithm into an instance of a constraint satisfaction problem,
and showing how this facilitates better understanding of its performance.
Copyright Notice
Copyright 1996. Published in the Proceedings of the 4th
Workshop on Program Comprehension, March 29-30, 1996, Berlin,
Germany. Personal use of this material is
permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for
advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective
works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse
any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be
obtained.
The Paper (10 pages)