Tony, there are a number of things that a source code analyzer can do that
would be very helpful if you found yourself coming into a company as a
consultant or as a new employee and they had no technical documentation:
List programs that open each file - useful for verifying that adding an
attribute won't blow up dimensioned arrays or confuse the program logic that
deals with the last attribute in the current dimension size, depending on
your version/flavor of MV - also useful when you are asked to add another
code for a field (eg Active/Terminated status field, suddenly users want to
add Pending or Sabbatical statuses - where do you need to add logic to
handle those new status values?)
List programs that write to each file (useful when trying to figure out "how
did that attribute get that inappropriate data in there?")
List of programs that call a given program (including by a variable name) -
useful when you change the list of variables passed to the program
Of course, now that we also have paragraphs that can write data, and tools
like SB and a variety of others that can store procedural information and
write commands in places other than Basic and Proc, it gets a bit trickier
to write that sort of automated source code analyzer - gone are the days
when you could pass the source code analyzer a list of Basic Program files,
a list of Proc files, and let it generate this sort of technical
documentation.
Susan Lynch
F.W. Davison & Company, Inc.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Gravagno" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 2:33 PM
Subject: RE: [U2] Basic developments "reverse engineering" tool ?
Herve Balestrieri wrote:
To clarify the inquiry : I am seeking for a tool reading Basic source
code modules and producing a technical documentation of an application
automatically.
This is not the purpose of an object code decompiler.
I don't believe there is a way to have a program read code and figure out
what it does from a logical perspective. When you say "technical
documentation", I'm not sure what sort of info you wish to extract from
your code. If you mean file usage, common usage, etc, the only way to get
a program to process such information is to make sure you have your code
completely consistent - or you need to use meta data as described below.
Java and .NET use structured comments with XML for doing this and I've
seen
a few MV packages do the same with BASIC. I'll make up some sample XML
below but this is how I might do it.
[Snipped to reduce size ]
Tony Gravagno
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