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Fission for Program Comprehension

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Mathematics of Program Construction (MPC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4014))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Jeremy Gibbons

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  1. Jeremy Gibbons
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, EE-12618, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tarmo Uustalu

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gibbons, J. (2006). Fission for Program Comprehension. In: Uustalu, T. (eds) Mathematics of Program Construction. MPC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4014. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11783596_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11783596_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35631-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35632-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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