Similarity in Programs

Abstract. An overview of the concept of program similarity is presented. It divides similarity into two types--syntactic and semantic-and provides a review of eight categories of methods that may be used to measure program similarity. A summary of some applications of these methods is included. The paper is intended to be a starting point for a more comprehensive analysis of the subject of similarity in programs, which is critical to understand if progress is to be made in fields such as clone detection. Keywords. computer programs, similarity, code clone, software comparison, program metrics, Levenshtein distance, parameterized difference, feature space, shared information, plagiarism, compression Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 06301 Duplication, Redundancy, and Similarity in Software http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/968 

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAGSTUHL
• Authors: Andrew Walenstein, Mohammad El-Ramly, James R. Cordy, William S. Evans, Kiarash Mahdavi, Markus Pizka, Ganesan Ramalingam, Jürgen Wolff von Gudenberg
• Keywords: Compression Dagstuhl Seminar, DAGSTUHL 2006, DAGSTUHL 2007, Proceedings 06301 Duplication, Program Similarity