QBO: A Query Tool Specially Developed to Explore Programs

  • Authors:

  • Francoise Balmas

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • WCRE '99 Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We introduce QBO, or Query by Outlines, a tool specially developed to help explore programs. It relies on a previously implemented system able to automatically construct outlines: every linear loop identified in a program is conceptualized according to the kind of computations it performs. QBO proposes an outline storage mechanism together with a query algorithm that enables outlines to be efficiently retrieved.QBO eases exploration of programs, thus program management, clone detection or plan recognition can be envisaged at lower cost: as outlines are already computed and indexed, only high level constructs have to be checked. Therefore, answering queries is a rather fast process. In this paper, we sketch our outlining model, present our query tool and discuss how query by outlines may help explore programs.