Challenges of refactoring C programs
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
An Empirical Analysis of C Preprocessor Use
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
On finding duplication and near-duplication in large software systems
WCRE '95 Proceedings of the Second Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Preprocessor Conditional Removal by Simple Partial Evaluation
WCRE '01 Proceedings of the Eighth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'01)
WPC '97 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (WPC '97)
Analyzing Multiple Configurations of a C Program
ICSM '05 Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
"Cloning Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful
WCRE '06 Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Granularity in software product lines
Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Using students as subjects - an empirical evaluation
Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
An analysis of the variability in forty preprocessor-based software product lines
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
Analyzing the discipline of preprocessor annotations in 30 million lines of C code
Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
CSMR '11 Proceedings of the 2011 15th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering
Analyzing the Effect of Preprocessor Annotations on Code Clones
SCAM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 11th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation
Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?
Empirical Software Engineering
Investigating preprocessor-based syntax errors
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Generative programming: concepts & experiences
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The C preprocessor (CPP) is a simple and language-independent tool, widely used to implement variable software systems using conditional compilation (i.e., by including or excluding annotated code). Although CPP provides powerful means to express variability, it has been criticized for allowing arbitrary annotations that break the underlying structure of the source code. We distinguish between disciplined annotations, which align with the structure of the source code, and undisciplined annotations, which do not. Several studies suggest that especially the latter type of annotations makes it hard to (automatically) analyze the code. However, little is known about whether the type of annotations has an effect on program comprehension. We address this issue by means of a controlled experiment with human subjects. We designed similar tasks for both, disciplined and undisciplined annotations, to measure program comprehension. Then, we measured the performance of the subjects regarding correctness and response time for solving the tasks. Our results suggest that there are no differences between disciplined and undisciplined annotations from a program-comprehension perspective. Nevertheless, we observed that finding and correcting errors is a time-consuming and tedious task in the presence of preprocessor annotations.