Outlining C loops: preliminary results and trends

Abstract

We report on a system developed to construct outlines of loops in C programs. It is derived from a model and a system previously defined to outline LISP loops, that have both been enhanced to handle those constructs of an imperative language like C that were out of scope in (pure functional) LISP, especially: iterative control flow structures, variable assignments, and manipulations of arrays, structures or pointers. In this paper, we first introduce our model for C loop outlining. Then we present the architecture of our system and describe the main steps of the outline construction process. We then discuss results obtained from the application of our system to two real-world programs and finally we show that this experiment gives a preview of the use of outlines as indexes for browsing and querying large scale programs.