Abstract :
Programmers working on large software systems spend a great deal of time examining code and trying to understand it. Code Analysis tools (e.g., cross referencing tools such as CIA and Cscope) can be very helpful in this process. In this paper we describe GENOA, an application generator that can produce a whole range of useful code analysis tools. GENOA is designed to be language- and front-end independent; it can be interfaced to any front-end for any language that produces an attributed parse tree, simply by writing an interface spec- ification. While GENOA programs can perform arbitrary analyses on the parse tree, the GENOA language has special, compact iteration operators that are tuned for expressing simple, polynomial time analysis programs; in fact, there is a useful sublanguage of GENOA that can express precisely all (and only) polynomial time (PTIME) analysis prograrns on parse-trees. Thus, we argue that GENOA is a convenient "little language" to implement simple, fast analysis tools. We describe the system, provide several practical examples, and present complexity and expressivity results for the abovementioned sublanguage of GENOA.
