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The determination of block-entropies is a well established method for the investigation of discrete data, also called symbols (7). There is a large variety of such symbolic sequences, ranging from texts written in natural languages,…

Code modification requires developers to comprehend code, plan changes, articulate intent, and validate outcomes, making it cognitively demanding. While natural language (NL) code summaries offer a promising external representation of this…

Developers increasingly take to the Internet for code snippets to integrate into their programs. To save developers the time required to switch from their development environments to a web browser in the quest for a suitable code snippet,…

Code summaries help developers comprehend programs and reduce their time to infer the program functionalities during software maintenance. Recent efforts resort to deep learning techniques such as sequence-to-sequence models for generating…

CodeRunner is a free open-source Moodle plugin for automatically marking student code. We describe our experience using CodeRunner for summative assessment in our first year undergraduate programming curriculum at Coventry University. We…

Commit messages are valuable resources for describing why code changes are committed to repositories in version control systems (e.g., Git). They effectively help developers understand code changes and better perform software maintenance…

Making a Prolog program more efficient by transforming its source code, without changing its operational semantics, is not an obvious task. It requires the user to have a clear understanding of how the Prolog compiler works, and in…

Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce code with subtle implementation-level bugs despite strong benchmark performance. These errors are hard for LLMs to spot and can have large behavioural effects; yet when asked to summarise code,…

Software change is the basic task of software evolution and maintenance. Phased Model for Software Change (PMSC) is a process model for software changes that localize in the code. It consists of several phases that cover both program…

Code review is one of the key processes in the software development lifecycle and is essential to maintain code quality. However, manual code review is subjective and time consuming. Given its rule-based nature, code review is well suited…

Context: Developing compilers and static analysis tools ("language tools") is a difficult and time-consuming task. We have previously presented *property probes*, a technique to help the language tool developer build understanding of their…

In software development, it is common for programmers to copy-paste or port code snippets and then adapt them to their use case. This scenario motivates the code adaptation task -- a variant of program repair which aims to adapt variable…

Many reasoning, planning, and problem-solving tasks share an intrinsic algorithmic nature: correctly simulating each step is a sufficient condition to solve them correctly. This work studies to what extent Large Language Models (LLMs) can…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances coding tasks by incorporating retrieved code examples into prompts. However, lengthy prompts, often exceeding tens of thousands of tokens, introduce challenges related to limited context windows…

In recent years, code security has become increasingly important, especially with the rise of interconnected technologies. Detecting vulnerabilities early in the software development process has demonstrated numerous benefits. Consequently,…

Summary descriptions of subroutines are short (usually one-sentence) natural language explanations of a subroutine's behavior and purpose in a program. These summaries are ubiquitous in documentation, and many tools such as JavaDocs and…

"Explain in Plain English" (EiPE) questions are widely used to assess code comprehension skills but are challenging to grade automatically. Recent approaches like Code Generation Based Grading (CGBG) leverage large language models (LLMs) to…

Developing an algorithm for a visualization prototype often involves the direct comparison of different development stages and design decisions, and even minor modifications may dramatically affect the results. While existing development…

Summarizing source code into natural language descriptions (code summarization) helps developers better understand program functionality and reduce the burden of software maintenance. Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), as opposed to source code,…