TY  - JOUR
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
PB  - IEEE COMPUTER SOC
TI  - Mining Semantic Loop Idioms
Y1  - 2018/07//
A1  - Allamanis, M
A1  - Barr, ET
A1  - Bird, C
A1  - Devanbu, P
A1  - Marron, M
A1  - Sutton, C
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2832048
VL  - 44
N2  - To write code, developers stitch together patterns, like API protocols or data structure traversals. Discovering these patterns can identify inconsistencies in code or opportunities to replace these patterns with an API or a language construct. We present coiling, a technique for automatically mining code for semantic idioms: surprisingly probable, semantic patterns. We specialize coiling for loop idioms, semantic idioms of loops. First, we show that automatically identifiable patterns exist, in great numbers, with a largescale empirical study of loops over 25MLOC. We find that most loops in this corpus are simple and predictable: 90 percent have fewer than 15LOC and 90 percent have no nesting and very simple control. Encouraged by this result, we then mine loop idioms over a second, buildable corpus. Over this corpus, we show that only 50 loop idioms cover 50 percent of the concrete loops. Our framework opens the door to data-driven tool and language design, discovering opportunities to introduce new API calls and language constructs. Loop idioms show that LINQ would benefit from an Enumerate operator. This can be confirmed by the exitence of a StackOverflow question with 542k views that requests precisely this feature.
EP  - 668
ID  - discovery10062734
SP  - 651
SN  - 1939-3520
JF  - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
AV  - public
KW  - Semantics
KW  -  Tools
KW  -  Syntactics
KW  -  Data mining
KW  -  C# languages
KW  -  Machine learning
KW  -  Testing
KW  -  Data-driven tool design
KW  -  idiom mining
KW  -  code patterns
IS  - 7
ER  -