Code Reading Assistance for Functional Programming based on Variable Def-use Relationships

Abstract

Code reading is important in several situations, including reusing existing programs and developing a program by several persons. In this paper, we report on our prototype implementation of a code-reading assistance tool for a functional programming language. Our tool is based on an observation that name, such as variable names, is the basic ingredient of the data-flow, which represents computations in functional programs. Our tool provides the following two functionalities by using dependencies between names calculated by a compiler: it can find definitions of names from their uses, and vice versa; it can visualize dependencies of source files based on dependencies of variables and functions in them and thereby helps us intuitively understand resources that each module uses.