Source code files as structured documents

Abstract

A means to add explicit structure to program source code is presented. XML is used to augment source code with syntactic information from the parse tree. More importantly, comments and formatting are preserved and identified for future use by development environments and program comprehension tools. The focus is to construct a document representation in XML instead of a more traditional data representation of the source code. This type of representation supports a programmer centric view of the source rather than a compiler centric view. Our representation is made relevant with respect to other research on XML representations of parse trees and program code. The highlights of the representation are presented and the use of queries and transformations discussed.