Representing Semantically Analyzed C++ Code with Reprise

A prominent stumbling block in the spread of the C++ programming language has been a lack of programming and analysis tools to aid development and maintenance of C++ systems. One way to make the job of tool developers easier and to increase the quality of the tools they create is to factor out the common components of tools and provide the components as easily (re)used building blocks. Those building blocks include lexical , syntactic, and semantic analyzers, tailored database derivers, code annotators and instrumentors, and code generators. From these building blocks, tools such as structure browsers, data-ow analyzers, program/speciication veriiers, metrics collectors, compilers , interpreters, and the like can be built more easily and cheaply. We believe that for C++ programming and analysis tools the most primitive building blocks are centered around a common representation of semantically analyzed C++ code. In this paper we describe such a representation, called Reprise (REPResentation Including SEmantics). The conceptual model underlying Reprise is based on the use of expressions to capture all semantic information about both the C++ language and code written in C++. The expressions can be viewed as forming a directed graph, where there is an explicit connection from each use of an entity to the declaration giving the semantics of that entity. We elaborate on this model, illustrate how various features of C++ are represented, discuss some categories of tools that would create and manipulate Reprise representations, and brieey describe our current implementation. This paper is not intended to provide a complete deenition of Reprise. Rather, its purpose is to introduce at a high level the basic approach we are taking in representing C++ code.