Educating JACKAL: cliche library development and use

JACKAL is a cliche-based program understanding tool that relies on the combination of a stylized abstract language (AL) representation, derived solely from simple syntactic analysis, along with a pair of matching algorithms (one linear and one tree), and a library of cliches to perform its analysis. Developing a cliche library involves constructing the library infrastructure, general-purpose tools for cliche development and a methodology for creating cliches. In this paper, we describe the two major tasks of (1) building the physical structure of the library, along with the capabilities for managing and maintaining that structure, and (2) identifying code segments as potentially useful cliche and transforming those code segments into cliches that are capable of matching as general a code set as possible.