Research On The Interactive General Tools For Program Comprehension

Software system understanding is employed in many software engineering fields, such as software maintenance, software testing, software reengineering, and software reuse. System understanding captures comprehensive and detail information on software system by analyzing system itself, system experts and system history. But in many cases, the complete and reliable information on software system relies on the program source code and other information must be derived from it. Therefore, program understanding is an important, even the primary, form of system understanding.Program understanding is a process requiring high level mental activities, whose efficiency is determined by the target program, the software engineer's domain experience and the support mechanism. Reverse engineering is an important kind of program understanding support mechanism, which collects program data, organizes and manages the data according to special data model, and presents the program with many abstract views, thereby facilitating the process of program understanding.Therefore, this paper will focus on high level conceptive abstraction on grammars of original programming language then getting the design intention from the source code in different levels and aspects and realizing platform independence. In this paper, LEX is used for lexical analysis; it is encapsulated in a dynamic library. Top-down LL(1) prediction is used in grammatical analysis. In the procedure of program understanding, grammar class library and semantic subroutine library are used to make it more open and adaptive.It uses observer pattern to provide the corresponding understanding model to help user accurate, rapid, comprehensive, multi-level understanding of software systems.To sum up, this paper's research on interaction and generality of program understanding tools has its theoretical and applicable value. It's useful for program understanding and IDE technology development.