A diagnosis system of programming styles using program patterns

Programming styles play an important role to promote maintainability of programs. The authors aim at developing a system for assisting a task that programmers rewrite programs in order to improve their readability, understandability and maintainability. This system detects program fragments which infringe programming styles in a C program and makes diagnosis on the programming style. This system has the following features: 1) It can detect various patterns, for example, context dependent patterns and dispersed patterns extending two or more functions. It is difficult to detect these patterns by character based pattern matching; and 2) Each style guideline is defined as program patterns. This system uses them as search data, so it becomes easy to add or change style guidelines which are to be checked. The authors validated that inspection of various style guidelines is possible through this system. Moreover, to evaluate the effectiveness of this system, they made experiments of inspecting a program for some style guidelines on 86 novice programmers. This result indicates that the system is effective in assisting a work that novice programmers check and/or correct programming styles.ArticleIEICE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION AND SYSTEMS. E83D(4):722-728 (2000)journal articl