Towards the Detection of Cross-Language Source Code Reuse

Abstract. Internet has made available huge amounts of information, also source code. Source code repositories and, in general, programming related websites, facilitate its reuse. In this work, we propose a simple approach to the detection of cross-language source code reuse, a nearly investigated problem. Our preliminary experiments, based on charac-ter n-grams comparison, show that considering different sections of the code (i.e., comments, code, reserved words, etc.), leads to different re-sults. When considering three programming languages: C++, Java, and Python, the best result is obtained when comments are discarded and the entire source code is considered