Page History

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•  no working Eclipse plugin found. (authors emailed)
• argument list pattern (sec 2.2) public _ (_, String, *) : any public method that accept a String as its second argument and returns any type
• quantifiers: no, all, exists...
• anonymous class
• pattern naming (integral := byte | short | int | long)
• variable binding
• no structural matching of AST (deemed difficult because uses class files) (so can't look match on a loop for example or find all local variables in method)

• Wiki Markup
  read\[F\]/write\[F\] predicates to indicate whether a method reads/write to a field. Nice feature: write\[_\] tells whether method writes to a field at all. How do we do this recursively? All methods within the method are not writing to fields...

• no support for generics (according to documentation)

Use case 1 not possible because no support for local variable decl. Use case 2 & 3 not possible because no support for generics/wildcards (due to bytecode source). Use 4 not possible because no support for statements & types of expressions. Use case 6 not possible because no control flow support.

BBQ

• doesn't detect local inner classes (local & anonymous). Only inner classes (doesn't differentiate): class in all classes
• no access to local variable declared in methods
• no support for generics.
• no support for constructors (considered as method init) 
• no AST structural matching. (e.g loops ...)
• no variable binding/unification
• set operators (union, intersection)
• support for read/write of fields references

Similar reasons to JTL.

*{+}SOUL \[authors replying on Tuesday\]+*

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• http://jquery.cs.ubc.ca/documentation/toc.html
• http://jquery.cs.ubc.ca/documentation/appendix2.html
• variable binding through predicates

• Wiki Markup
  support for read & efftects of fields (write) \[writes(?B,?F,?L) means: "Block ?B writes to field ?F at location ?L"\]

• no structural (statement) matching (e.g pattern match on a loop or body of a method)
• no generics support
• no quantifiers

Similar reasons to JTL.

*+.QL \[authors emailed\]+*

• New version stores every AST node unit in DB
• has notion of aggregates (count, sum, max, min, avg)
• ".QL: Object-Oriented Queries made Easy"

Very expressive. Though sql statements may not scale for control flow matching. (direct ast pattern matching is clearer for some use cases)

*{+}Jackpot \[emailed Jan from Netbeans\]+*

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• http://www.ing.iac.es/~docs/external/java/pmd/rules/design.html
• http://code.google.com/p/code-cop-code/wiki/PmdRulesCodecop
• structural matching: all AST hiearchy can be queried through Xpath expression
• can't express subtype relations. E.g. assignments where RHS is supertype of left handside and different
• no variable binding
• support generic constructors but not bind it to enclosing class: //ConstructorDeclaration//TypeParameters
• no support for read/write effects

No variable binding support which restricts a lot of the analysis. 

Taxonomy

• Model: Relational vs Tree
• control flow statements 
• variable binding & cross reference
• types information of AST nodes + type constraints (subtype relations)
• set operators
• generics / wildcards
• read/write references
• anonymous class
• aggregates (grouping results)
• pattern matching? (i.e JTL style for argument list, SOUL like for AST matching)
• universal quantifiers (forall, exists, no)
• querying style

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