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Supporting the restructuring of data abstractions through manipulation of a program visualization

Editor: W. Richards Adrion Authors:

Robert W. Bowdidge,

William G. GriswoldAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 7, Issue 2

Pages 109 - 157

https://doi.org/10.1145/279310.279312

Published: 01 April 1998 Publication History

Abstract

With a meaning-preserving restructuring tool, a software engineer can change a program's structure to ease future modifications. However, deciding how to restructure the program requires a global understanding of the program's structure, which cannot be derived easily by directly inspecting the source code. We describe a manipulable program visualization—the star diagram—that supports the restructuring task of encapsulating a global data structure. The star diagram graphically displays information pertinent to encapsulation, and direct manipulation of the diagram causes the underlying program to be restructured. The visualization compactly presents all statements in the program that use the given global data structure, helping the programmer to choose the functions that completely encapsulate it. Additionally, the visualization elides code unrelated to the data structure and to the task and collapses similar expressions to help the programmer identify frequently occurring code fragments and manipulate them together. The visualization is mapped directly to the program text, so manipulation of the visualization also restructures the program. We present the star diagram concept and describe an implementation of the star diagram built upon a meaning-preserving restructuring tool for Scheme. We also describe our creation of star diagram generators for C programs, and we test the scalability of the star diagram using large C and MUMPS programs.

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Index Terms

Supporting the restructuring of data abstractions through manipulation of a program visualization
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Integrated and visual development environments
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Abstract data types
        Modules / packages

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 7, Issue 2

April 1998

106 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/279310

Editor:
W. Richards Adrion
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1998 ACM.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1998

Published in TOSEM Volume 7, Issue 2

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Yin QZhang WZhang YLiu T(2019)Chinese Zero Pronoun ResolutionACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/332588419:1(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3325884
Kong FZhang MZhou G(2019)Chinese Zero Pronoun ResolutionACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/332112919:1(1-21)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3321129
Kaya MFawcett J(2017)Identification of Extract Method Refactoring Opportunities through Analysis of Variable Declarations and UsesInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819401750003627:01(49-69)Online publication date: Feb-2017
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