Interactively extracting internal program information in language-based editing systems

Programmers spend a significant amount of time in understanding existing programs for the purpose of program maintenance and further program development. Extracting internal program information can greatly help programmers to achieve this target. In this paper, a new mechanism is introduced in language-based editing systems to extract internal program information. The new model is evolved from the integration of attribute grammars and relations, drawing upon the advantages of both. The extraction of internal program information is used in two ways: 1) performing static-sematic analysis in language-based editing systems, 2) unveiling program dependencies for program comprehension. The model has been used in our generating system for the language-based editing system, TextSyn [1], and has been proven to be useful and powerful