Document View

Michael L. Collard, Ph.D.

Department of Computer Science, The University of Akron

Levels of Source Code

  • Lexical characters, lines, Lexer
  • Syntactic statements, part of AST, Parser
  • Documentary Comments, whitespace
  • Semantic Behavior, actual execution, execution of intermediate representation

Regex Examples

  • Search for a keyword
  • Search for a comment line
  • Search for a statement
  • Search for an underflow error

Regex & Levels

View Regex
Lexical ✔
Documentary ✔
Syntactic ✗
Semantic ✗

AST Examples

  • Search for a keyword
  • Search for a comment line
  • Search for a statement
  • Search for an underflow error

AST & Levels

View AST
Lexical ✗
Documentary ✗
Syntactic ✔
Semantic ?

So Far

View Regex AST
Lexical ✔ ✗
Documentary ✔ ✗
Syntactic ✗ ✔
Semantic ✗ ?

Document View

Preserve all text in the original file, including whitespace and newlines, and use markup to add syntactic and AST information

  • Standard markup languages, e.g., XML, have mature tools for search, query, and transformation
  • Preserving all original text means the original file can be extracted from the format
  • srcML

Document View Examples

  • Search for a keyword
  • Search for a comment line
  • Search for a statement
  • Search for an underflow error

Comparison

View Regex AST Document View
Lexical ✔ ✗ ✔
Documentary ✔ ✗ ✔
Syntactic ✗ ✔ ✔
Semantic ✗ ? ✗