A hybrid approach to recognizing programming plans

A hybrid approach to program understanding is presented. It uses an indexed, hierarchical organization of the plan library to limit the number of candidate plans considered during program understanding. This approach is based on observations made from studying the attempts of student programmers to perform bottom-up understanding on geometrically oriented C functions and relies on a highly organized plan library, where each plan has indexing, specialization, and implication links to other plans. It uses an algorithm that takes advantage to these indices to suggest general candidate plans to match top-down against the code, specializations to refine these general plans once they are recognized, and implications to recognize other, related plans without performing further matching