Towards Automated Construction of Tabular Expressions

Abstract

<p>Deriving precise descriptions of existing programs using automated actions plays a significant role in software engineering, especially in projects that are not well documented. Tabular expressions (tables) are practical formalized specification notations that can be used in place of conventional mathematical expressions. Building function tables from source code is a tremendous aid to understand the behavior of target programs for inspectors and maintainers. However, generating those tables manually is tedious and time consuming.</p> <p>This thesis presents an automated method that will help extract vector function tables from imperative programs in C. By dealing with the three primitive constructs (assignments, alternations, iterations) we aim to translate the target programs into functional documentation using tabular expressions. We discuss the difficulties we encountered and t he methods we chose to overcome t hose difficulties. Loop termination and pattern matching are also discussed in our analysis. Currently, we stop short of producing the tabular expressions, but it is easy to see that tables can be generated from the expressions produced by our tool.</p>