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codeQuest: Scalable Source Code Queries with Datalog

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Book cover ECOOP 2006 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 4067))

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Abstract

Source code querying tools allow programmers to explore relations between different parts of the code base. This paper describes such a tool, named codeQuest. It combines two previous proposals, namely the use of logic programming and database systems.

As the query language we use safe Datalog, which was originally introduced in the theory of databases. That provides just the right level of expressiveness; in particular recursion is indispensable for source code queries. Safe Datalog is like Prolog, but all queries are guaranteed to terminate, and there is no need for extra-logical annotations.

Our implementation of Datalog maps queries to a relational database system. We are thus able to capitalise on the query optimiser provided by such a system. For recursive queries we implement our own optimisations in the translation from Datalog to SQL. Experiments confirm that this strategy yields an efficient, scalable code querying system.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programming Tools Group, Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Elnar Hajiyev, Mathieu Verbaere & Oege de Moor

Authors
  1. Elnar Hajiyev
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  2. Mathieu Verbaere
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  3. Oege de Moor
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bedarra Research Lab., 1 Stafford Road, Suite 421, K2H 1B9, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Dave Thomas

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Hajiyev, E., Verbaere, M., de Moor, O. (2006). codeQuest: Scalable Source Code Queries with Datalog. In: Thomas, D. (eds) ECOOP 2006 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11785477_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11785477_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35726-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35727-8

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