srcQL: A syntax-aware query language for source code

Bartman, Brian; Newman, Christian D.; Collard, Michael L.; Maletic, Jonathan I.

doi:10.1109/saner.2017.7884655

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Source code query languages (SCQL) and tools enable developers to query source code to check conformance to potential design rules or find patterns in code. Some offer query languages which are close to natural language [2,5]. srcQL is a code query language built upon the XML representation of the AST and XPath and is modeled on SQL [5].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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RulePad: interactive authoring of checkable design rules

Mehrpour

LaToza

Sarvari

2020

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

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Good documentation offers the promise of enabling developers to easily understand design decisions. Unfortunately, in practice, design documents are often rarely updated, becoming inaccurate, incomplete, and untrustworthy. A better solution is to enable developers to write down design rules which are checked against code for consistency. But existing rule checkers require learning specialized query languages or program analysis frameworks, creating a barrier to writing project-specific rules. We introduce two new techniques for authoring design rules: snippet-based authoring and semi-natural-language authoring. In snippet-based authoring, developers specify characteristics of elements to match by writing partial code snippets. In semi-natural language authoring, a textual representation offers a representation for understanding design rules and resolving ambiguities. We implemented these approaches in RulePad. To evaluate RulePad, we conducted a between-subjects study with 14 participants comparing RulePad to the PMD Designer, a utility for writing rules in a popular rule checker. We found that those with RulePad were able to successfully author 13 times more query elements in significantly less time and reported being significantly more willing to use RulePad in their everyday work. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software maintenance tools; • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some offer query languages which are close to natural language [2,5]. srcQL is a code query language built upon the XML representation of the AST and XPath and is modeled on SQL [5]. Developers are able to query code using a semi-structured natural language in Browse-By-Query (BBQ) [2].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

RulePad: interactive authoring of checkable design rules

Mehrpour

LaToza

Sarvari

2020

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Some offer query languages which are close to natural language [2, 5]. srcQL is a code query language built upon the XML representation of the AST and XPath and is modeled on SQL [5]. Developers are able to query code using a semi-structured natural language in Browse-By-Query (BBQ) [2].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

RulePad: Interactive Authoring of Checkable Design Rules

Mehrpour,

LaToza,

Sarvari

2020

Preprint

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Good documentation offers the promise of enabling developers to easily understand design decisions. Unfortunately, in practice, design documents are often rarely updated, becoming inaccurate, incomplete, and untrustworthy. A better solution is to enable developers to write down design rules which are checked against code for consistency. But existing rule checkers require learning specialized query languages or program analysis frameworks, creating a barrier to writing project-specific rules. We introduce two new techniques for authoring design rules: snippet-based authoring and semi-natural-language authoring. In snippet-based authoring, developers specify characteristics of elements to match by writing partial code snippets. In semi-natural language authoring, a textual representation offers a representation for understanding design rules and resolving ambiguities. We implemented these approaches in RulePad. To evaluate RulePad, we conducted a between-subjects study with 14 participants comparing RulePad to the PMD Designer, a utility for writing rules in a popular rule checker. We found that those with RulePad were able to successfully author 13 times more query elements in significantly less time and reported being significantly more willing to use RulePad in their everyday work. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software maintenance tools; • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools.

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“…srcQL [13], [35] is another query language based on both srcML (an XML representation of source code) and previously described XPath. srcML helps cope with abstraction problem by providing the XML with concrete syntax information thanks to ANTLR.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here condition and anyStatement are metavariables that will match any valid IR construct (not all IR constructs of the language) and the rest of the pattern is the standard syntax of the language to match (here Java). To forgo the IR requirement, syntactic patterns have been introduced (sometimes named "code templates") to build upon the syntax of languages instead of their IRs [12], [13], [14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Reflexive and Automated Approach to Syntactic Pattern Matching in Code Transformations

Lecerf¹,

Brant²,

Goubier³

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Empowering software engineers often requires to let them write code transformations. However existing automated or tool-supported approaches force developers to have a detailed knowledge of the internal representation of the underlying tool. While this knowledge is time consuming to master, the syntax of the language, on the other hand, is already well known to developers and can serve as a strong foundation for pattern matching. Pattern languages with metavariables (that is variables holding abstract syntax subtrees once the pattern has been matched) have been used to help programmers define program transformations at the language syntax level. The question raised is then the engineering cost of metavariable support. Our contribution is to show that, with a GLR parser, such patterns with metavariables can be supported by using a form of runtime reflexivity on the parser internal structures. This approach allows one to directly implement such patterns on any parser generated by a parser generation framework, without asking the pattern writer to learn the AST structure and node types. As a use case for that approach we describe the implementation built on top of the SmaCC (Smalltalk Compiler Compiler) GLR parser generator framework. This approach has been used in production for source code transformations on a large scale. We will express perspectives to adapt this approach to other types of parsing technologies.

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srcQL: A syntax-aware query language for source code

Cited by 6 publications

References 18 publications

RulePad: interactive authoring of checkable design rules

RulePad: interactive authoring of checkable design rules

RulePad: Interactive Authoring of Checkable Design Rules

A Reflexive and Automated Approach to Syntactic Pattern Matching in Code Transformations

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