Magic Literals in Pharo

Delplanque, Julien; Ducasse, Stephane; Zaitsev, Oleksandr

Document type :

Communication dans un congrès avec actes

Title :

Magic Literals in Pharo

Author(s) :

Delplanque, Julien [Auteur]
Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Ducasse, Stephane [Auteur]

Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Zaitsev, Oleksandr [Auteur]
Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]

Conference title :

IWST19 - International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies

City :

Köln

Country :

Allemagne

Start date of the conference :

2019-08-26

English keyword(s) :

Software analysis
Extensibility
Idioms
Quality

HAL domain(s) :

Informatique [cs]/Langage de programmation [cs.PL]
Informatique [cs]/Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

English abstract : [en]

Literals are constant values (numbers, strings, etc.) used in the source code. Magic literals are the ones used without a clear explanation of their meaning. Presence of such literals harms source code readability, decreases ...
Show more >Literals are constant values (numbers, strings, etc.) used in the source code. Magic literals are the ones used without a clear explanation of their meaning. Presence of such literals harms source code readability, decreases its modularity, and encourages code duplication. Identifying magic literals is not straightforward. A literal can be considered self-explanatory in one context and magic in another. We need a heuristic to help developers spot magic literals. In this article, we study and characterize the literals in Pharo. We implemented a heuristic to detect magic literals and integrated it as a code critic rule for System Browser and Critics Browser in Pharo 7. We run our heuristic on 112,500 Pharo methods which reported 23,292 magic literals spread across 8,986 methods. We manually validated our approach on a random subset of 100 methods and found that 62% of the reported literals in those methods are indeed magic.Show less >

Language :

Anglais

Peer reviewed article :

Oui

Audience :

Internationale

Popular science :

Non

Collections :

Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille (CRIStAL) - UMR 9189

Source :

Harvested from HAL

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