A lightweight fact extractor is presented that utilizes XML tools, such as XPath and XSLT, to extract static information from C++ source code programs. The source code is first converted into an XML representation, srcML, to facilitate the use of a wide variety of XML tools. The method is deemed lightweight because only a partial parsing of the source is done. Additionally, the technique is quite robust and can be applied to incomplete and non-compile-able source code. The trade off to this approach is that queries on some low level details cannot be directly addressed. This approach is applied to a fact extractor benchmark as comparison with other, abet heavier weight, fact extractors. Fact extractors are widely used to support understanding tasks associated with maintenance, reverse engineering and various other software engineering tasks. 1.

One of the most critical issues in large-scale software development and maintenance is the rapidly growing size and complexity of software systems. As a result of this rapid growth there is a need to better understand the relationships between the different parts of a large software system. In this paper we present a reverse engineering framework called Columbus that is able to analyze large C++ projects, and a schema for C++ that prescribes the form of the extracted data. The flexible architecture of the Columbus system with a powerful C++ analyzer and schema makes it a versatile and readily extendible toolset for reverse engineering. This tool is free for scientific and educational purposes and we fervently hope that it will assist academic persons in any research work related to C++ re- and reverse engineering.

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Developing a standard schema at the abstract syntax tree level for C/C++ to be used by reverse engineering and reengineering tools is a complex and difficult problem. In this paper, we present a catalogue of issues that need to be considered in order to design a solution. Three categories of issues are discussed. Lexical structure is the first

In this paper we describe a technique that can be used to annotate source code with syntactic tags in XML format. This is achieved by modifying the parser generator bison to emit these tags for an arbitrary LALR grammar. We also discuss an immediate application of this technique, a portable modification of the gcc compiler, that allows for XML output for C, Objective C, C++ and Java programs. While our approach is based on a representation of the parse-tree and does not have the same semantic richness as other approaches, it does have the advantage of being language independent, and thus re-usable in a number of different domains. 1.

An infrastructure is a set of interconnected structural elements, such as tools and schemas, that provide a framework for supporting an entire structure. The reverse engineering community has recognized the importance of interoperability, the cooporation of two or more systems to enable the exchange and utilization of data, and has noted that the current lack of interoperability is a contributing factor to the lack of adoption of available infrastructures. To address the problems of interoperability and reproducing previous results, we present an infrastructure that supports interoperability among reverse engineering tools and applications. We present the design of our infrastructure, including the hierarchy of schemas that captures the interactions among graph structures. We also develop and utilize our implementation, which is designed using a GXL-based pipe-filter architecture, to perform a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of our infrastructure. 1

The Internet has grown in popularity in recent years, and thus it has gained importance for many current businesses. They need to o#er their products and services through their Web sites. To present not only static content but also interactive services, the logic behind these services needs to be programmed.

Software maintenance, program analysis and transformation tools almost always rely on static source code analysis as the first and fundamental step to gather information. In the past, two different strategies have been adopted to develop tool suites. There are tools encompassing or implementing the source parse step, where the parser is internal to the toolkit, developed and maintained with it. A different approach builds tools on the top of external, already available, components such as compilers that output the abstract syntax tree, or make it available via an API. This paper

Abstract Program comprehension research can be characterized by both the theories that provide rich explanations about how programmers understand software, as well as the tools that are used to assist in comprehension tasks. In this paper, I review some of the key cognitive theories of program comprehension that have emerged over the past thirty years. Using these theories as a canvas, I then explore how tools that are commonly used today have evolved to support program comprehension. Specifically, I discuss how the theories and tools are related and reflect on the research methods that were used to construct the theories and evaluate the tools. The reviewed theories and tools are distinguished according to human characteristics, program characteristics, and the context for the various comprehension tasks. Finally, I predict how these characteristics will change in the future and speculate on how a number of important research directions could lead to improvements in program comprehension tool development and research methods.

An automated approach to the identification of C++0x concepts in function templates is described. Concepts are part of a new language feature appearing in the next standard for C++ (i.e., C++0x). Concept identification is the enumeration of constraints on the sets of types over which templates can be instantiated. The approach analyzes template source code and computes a set of viable concept instances describing the implied data abstraction of the template parameters. The approach is evaluated on generic algorithms defined in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach. The approach can be used to assist in reengineering existing generic libraries to C++0x. Additionally, it has the potential to assist in the validation of concept hierarchies and interface definition in generic libraries. 1.