A Dedicated Language for Object-Oriented Design Analyses

A lot of static analyses techniques that address the quality of object-oriented design appeared in the last decade. These analyses were implemented using a large variety of programming languages. Due to this heterogeneity of expression the understanding and potential interconnection of these analyses is severely hampered. In this paper we introduce SAIL 1, a language dedicated to the aforementioned type of static analyses. By its properties the language allows a simple and understandable expression of different analyses. Motivation When we have in front of us the source of a program, besides its functional accuracy we are also interested in the quality of the design or of the implementation as it is reflected in the source code. This is what code analysis is all about. If the source code is as small as a few or hundreds of lines of code, we can examine the code manually; but as the source code becomes larger we want to find out a lot of additional things like the impact of change a class functionality on the other classes and all of these things cannot be done manually. Static source code analysis [3] is the process by which software developers check their code for problems and inconsistencies before compiling. Development organizations have two basic alternative