CLIPS template system for program understanding

Abstract

Program understanding is a subfield of software reengineering and attempts to recognize the run-time behavior of source code. To this point, success in this area has been limited to very small code segments. An expert system, HLAR (High-Level Algorithm Recognizer), has been written in CLIPS and recognizes three sorting algorithms, selection sort, quicksort, and heapsort. This paper describes the HLAR system in general and, in depth, the CLIPS templates used for program representation and understanding.