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Fission for Program Comprehension

Jeremy Gibbons

Abstract

Fusion is a program transformation that combines adjacent computations, flattening structure and improving efficiency at the cost of clarity. Fission is the same transformation, in reverse: creating structure, ex nihilo. We explore the use of fission for program comprehension, that is, for reconstructing the design of a program from its implementation. We illustrate through rational reconstructions of the designs for three different C programs that count the words in a text file.

Details

Book Title

Mathematics of Program Construction

Editor

Tarmo Uustalu

Pages

162−179

Publisher

Springer−Verlag

Series

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Volume

4014

Year

2006

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