MACRO IMPACT ANALYSIS USING MACRO SLICING

László Vidács, Árpád Beszédes, Rudolf Ferenc

2007

Abstract

The expressiveness of the C/C++ preprocessing facility enables the development of highly configurable source code. However, the usage of language constructs like macros also bears the potential of resulting in highly incomprehensible and unmaintainable code, which is due to the flexibility and the “cryptic” nature of the pre-processor language. This could be overcome if suitable analysis tools were available for preprocessor-related issues, however, this is not the case (for instance, none of the modern Integrated Development Environments provides features to efficiently analyze and browse macro usage). A conspicuous problem in software maintenance is the correct (safe and efficient) management of change. In particular, due to the aforementioned reasons, determining efficiently the impact of a change in a specific macro definition is not yet possible. In this paper, we describe a method for the impact analysis of macro definitions, which significantly differs from the previous approaches. We reveal and analyze the dependencies among macro-related program points using the so-called macro slices.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Vidács L., Beszédes Á. and Ferenc R. (2007). MACRO IMPACT ANALYSIS USING MACRO SLICING . In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 2: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-8111-06-7, pages 230-235. DOI: 10.5220/0001341902300235

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft07,
author={László Vidács and Árpád Beszédes and Rudolf Ferenc},
title={MACRO IMPACT ANALYSIS USING MACRO SLICING},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 2: ICSOFT,},
year={2007},
pages={230-235},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001341902300235},
isbn={978-989-8111-06-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 2: ICSOFT,
TI - MACRO IMPACT ANALYSIS USING MACRO SLICING
SN - 978-989-8111-06-7
AU - Vidács L.
AU - Beszédes Á.
AU - Ferenc R.
PY - 2007
SP - 230
EP - 235
DO - 10.5220/0001341902300235