Re: succinctness = power

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 01:50:32 -0400
   From: "Anton van Straaten" <anton@appsolutions.com>

   > If we actually ran some kind of automatic pattern-recognizer to
   > automatically extract macros/functions from our code, I think it might
   > sometimes violate (a): it might find patterns that are factorable, but
   > the line it draws around this commonality might not actually reflect a
   > "meaningful" concept.

   I suspect a tool like that might still be quite useful, even if it only
   identified possible patterns.

Yes, I agree.

Hey, perhaps somebody out there could suggest this as a topic for an
undergraduate thesis or something.  Build such a tool, run it over
some large code bases (open source programs like Apache, for example),
and see what it turns up.  (Of course you'd iterate on the design of
the tool, etc.)  I, for one, would be very interested to see the
results.

-- Dan