A style analysis of C programs

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A style analysis of C programs

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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 28 , Issue 1 (January 1985) table of contents
Special section on computer architecture

Pages: 80 - 88

Year of Publication: 1985

ISSN:0001-0782

Authors

R E. Berry	Lancaster Univ., Lancaster, UK
B A.E. Meekings	AGS Computers, Inc., Mountainside, NJ

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 11, Downloads (12 Months): 58, Citation Count: 17

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abstract references cited by index terms review collaborative colleagues

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ABSTRACT

A large quantity of well-respected software is tested against a series of metrics designed to measure program lucidity, with intriguing results. Although slanted toward software written in the C language, the measures are adaptable for analyzing most high-level languages.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	B. A. E. Meekings, Style analysis of Pascal programs, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.18 n.9, September 1983 [doi>10.1145/988227.988232]
	2	Michael J. Rees, Automatic assessment aids for Pascal programs, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.17 n.10, p.33-42, October 1982 [doi>10.1145/948086.948088]

CITED BY 17

	Lem O. Ejiogu, A unified theory of software metrics, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM sixteenth annual conference on Computer science, p.232-238, February 1988, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
	Paul W. Oman , Curtis R. Cook, A taxonomy for programming style, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation, p.244-250, February 20-22, 1990, Washington, D.C., United States
	Fatima Z. Mansouri , Cleveland A. Gibbon , Colin A. Higgins, PRAM: prolog automatic marker, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.30 n.3, p.166-170, Sept. 1998
	David Jackson, A semi-automated approach to online assessment, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.32 n.3, p.164-167, Sept. 2000
	David Jackson , Michelle Usher, Grading student programs using ASSYST, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.29 n.1, p.335-339, March 1997
	K. A. Redish , W. F. Smyth, Program style analysis: a natural by-product of program compilation, Communications of the ACM, v.29 n.2, p.126-133, Feb. 1986
	Mike Joy , Michael Luck, Effective electronic marking for on-line assessment, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.30 n.3, p.134-138, Sept. 1998
	D. B. Simmons , N. C. Ellis , T. D. Escamilla, Manager Associate, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v.5 n.3, p.426-438, June 1993
	Warren Harrison , Curtis R. Cook, A note on the Berry-Meekings style metric, Communications of the ACM, v.29 n.2, p.123-125, Feb. 1986
	Susan A. Mengel , Vinay Yerramilli, A case study of the static analysis of the quality of novice student programs, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.31 n.1, p.78-82, March 1999
	N. Gorla , A. C. Benander , B. A. Benander, Debugging Effort Estimation Using Software Metricsv, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.16 n.2, p.223-231, February 1990
	C. C. Cook , M. Nanja, Prototype software complexity metrics tools, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.12 n.3, p.58-60, July 1987
	P. W. Oman , C. R. Cook, A paradigm for programming style research, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.23 n.12, p.69-78, Dec. 1988
	G Perlman, Coding quality and tools in programming methods, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.11 n.3, p.44-50, July 1986
	Al Lake , Curtis Cook, Style: an automated program style analyzer, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.22 n.3, p.29-33, Sep. 1990
	Ahmed Abbasi , Hsinchun Chen, Writeprints: A stylometric approach to identity-level identification and similarity detection in cyberspace, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.26 n.2, p.1-29, March 2008
	Abram Hindle , Michael W. Godfrey , Richard C. Holt, Reading beside the lines: Using indentation to rank revisions by complexity, Science of Computer Programming, v.74 n.7, p.414-429, May, 2009

INDEX TERMS

Classification:
D. Software
D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
D.2.9 Management
Subjects: Software quality assurance (SQA)
D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
D.3.2 Language Classifications

Nouns: C

General Terms:
Languages, Measurement

REVIEW

"Warren A. Harrison : Reviewer"

This paper proposes an objective, automatically derivable “style metric” for C programs. Unfortunately, there is no discussion in the paper as to what exactly constitutes “style.” The short, four-line summary at the top o more...

Collaborative Colleagues:

R E. Berry: colleagues

B A.E. Meekings: colleagues

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