Automatic software documentation support: an example of machine translation

Abstract

An approach for deriving an English-language description of a computer program directly from the source code is presented. Two levels of translation are presented: statement rendering, to derive the English-language equivalent of the program statements, and concept abstraction, to deduce the purpose of the program. The translation method presented is shown to be equivalent to language translation, with some restrictions. One restriction is that the translation grammar is not bidirectional when abstractions are considered. Another is that the source (program) language is much more regularized than is normally the case with spoken (natural) languages.<>