Annie T. T. Ying
ABSTRACT
A programmer performing a change task to a system can benefit from accurate comments on the source code. As part of good programming practice described by Kernighan and Pike in the book The Practice of Programming, comments should "aid the understanding of a program by briefly pointing out salient details or by providing a larger-scale view of the proceedings." In this paper, we explore the widely varying uses of comments in source code. We find that programmers not only use comments for describing the actual source code, but also use comments for many other purposes, such as "talking" to colleagues through the source code using a comment "Joan, please fix this method." This kind of comments can complicate the mining of project information because such team communication is often perceived to reside in separate archives, such as emails or newsgroup postings, rather than in the source code. Nevertheless, these and other types of comments can be very useful inputs for mining project information.
- Eclipse task tags website. http://127.0.0.1:55317/help/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user/referencrefpreferences-task-tags.htm.Google Scholar
- W. G. Griswold. Coping with crosscutting software changes using information transparency. In Reflection 2001: International Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting, pages 250--265, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. W. Kernighan and R. Pike. The practice of programming. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D.E. Knuth. Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2):97--111, 1984. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. L. Parnas. On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Communication of ACM, 15(12):1053--1058, 1972. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Source code that talks: an exploration of Eclipse task comments and their implication to repository mining
Recommendations
Source code that talks: an exploration of Eclipse task comments and their implication to repository mining
A programmer performing a change task to a system can benefit from accurate comments on the source code. As part of good programming practice described by Kernighan and Pike in the book The Practice of Programming, comments should "aid the understanding ...
Analyzing the co-evolution of comments and source code
Source code comments are a valuable instrument to preserve design decisions and to communicate the intent of the code to programmers and maintainers. Nevertheless, commenting source code and keeping comments up-to-date is often neglected for reasons of ...
An Extractive-and-Abstractive Framework for Source Code Summarization
(Source) Code summarization aims to automatically generate summaries/comments for given code snippets in the form of natural language. Such summaries play a key role in helping developers understand and maintain source code. Existing code summarization ...
Comments