Fission for program comprehension

  • Authors:
  • Jeremy Gibbons

  • Affiliations:
  • Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, UK

  • Venue:
  • MPC'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mathematics of Program Construction
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Fusion is a program transformation that combines adjacent computations, flattening structure and improving efficiency at the cost of clarity. Fission is the same transformation, in reverse: creating structure, ex nihilo. We explore the use of fission for program comprehension, that is, for reconstructing the design of a program from its implementation. We illustrate through rational reconstructions of the designs for three different C programs that count the words in a text file.