An Implementation of and Experiment with Semantic Differencing

  • Authors:
  • D. Binkley;R. Capellini;R. Raszewski;C. Smith

  • Affiliations:
  • Loyola College;Loyola College;Loyola College;Loyola College

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '01 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'01)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Software maintainers face a wide range of difficult tasks including impact analysis and regression testing. Understanding semantic relationships, such as the semantic cohesiveness in a program or the semantic differences between two programs, can help a maintainer address these problems. However, semantic analysis is a difficult problem. For example, few semantic differencing algorithms and even fewer implementations exist. The first semantic differencing implementation for the C language is presented and studied. The study illustrates the practicality of semantics differencing.