/*icomment: bugs or bad comments?*/

Commenting source code has long been a common practice in software development. Compared to source code, comments are more direct, descriptive and easy-to-understand. Comments and source code provide relatively redundant and independent information regarding a program’s semantic behavior. As software evolves, they can easily grow out-of-sync, indicating two problems: (1) bugs the source code does not follow the assumptions and requirements specified by correct program comments; (2) bad comments - comments that are inconsistent with correct code, which can confuse and mislead programmers to introduce bugs in subsequent versions. Unfortunately, as most comments are written in natural language, no solution has been proposed to automatically analyze comments and detect inconsistencies between comments and source code. This paper takes the first step in automatically analyzing comments written in natural language to extract implicit program rules and use these rules to automatically de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Lin Tan, Ding Yuan, Gopal Krishna, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Correct Program Comments, Large Code Bases, Operating System, SOSP 2007, Source Code