A novel detection approach for statement clones

Activities such as copying, pasting and modifying codes usually lead to a lot of code clones in the software systems. These code clones have a great impact on software development and maintenance. This paper presents a new clone detection approach. That is to uses a algorithm based on suffix array to efficiently search repeated token substrings and finally to detect code clones. We also develop a clone detection tool SaCD in order to implement the method. This tool has detected statement clones in 31 open source software systems of C, C++ and Java language. The experimental results show that the SaCD can efficiently detect code clones at the statement granularity in the software.