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Using Slicing to Identify Duplication in Source Code

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Static Analysis (SAS 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2126))

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Abstract

Programs often have a lot of duplicated code, which makes both understanding and maintenance more difficult. This problem can be alleviated by detecting duplicated code, extracting it into a separate new procedure, and replacing all the clones (the instances of the duplicated code) by calls to the new procedure. This paper describes the design and initial implementation of a tool that finds clones and displays them to the programmer. The novel aspect of our approach is the use of program dependence graphs (PDGs) and program slicing to find isomorphic PDG subgraphs that represent clones. The key benefits of this approach are that our tool can find non-contiguous clones (clones whose components do not occur as contiguous text in the program), clones in which matching statements have been reordered, and clones that are intertwined with each other. Furthermore, the clones that are found are likely to be meaningful computations, and thus good candidates for extraction.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Raghavan Komondoor & Susan Horwitz

  2. IEI del CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Susan Horwitz

Authors
  1. Raghavan Komondoor
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  2. Susan Horwitz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Département d’Informatique, École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75230, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Patrick Cousot

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Komondoor, R., Horwitz, S. (2001). Using Slicing to Identify Duplication in Source Code. In: Cousot, P. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2126. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47764-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47764-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42314-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47764-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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