Program Recognition by Observation

The understanding of a program involves the recognition the hierarchical structure of the program's design. Previous program recognition systems are based on the analysis of program code. We present an algorithm for program recognition by observing the actions performed by the program when the program is executed. 1. Introduction The problem of program recognition is that of building a hierarchical description of the program's design. The ability of automatic program recognition allows intelligent tutoring systems to offer a wide variety of help to students. Many tasks in software engineering such as debugging, documentation, enhancement, and maintenance may also benefit a great deal from automatic program recognition. There have been a number of approaches to program recognition. Johnson's proust [ Johnson, 1986; 1990 ] is a system that analyzes and debugs pascal programs written by novice programmers. Wills [ Wills, 1990 ] demonstrated a prototype program recognizer which transform..