Collating Results of Syntatic Searches by Context

Maintenance programming tasks often require answering questions such as "how is this data structure used?", "which operations are performed upon this class?", or "where is this value assigned?" Such tasks are difficult with only grep-style file-and-line ordered output because the programmer must collate similar lines mentally, rather than directly perceiving the answer to the query from the search's output. To better answer questions about how a declaration is used, I implemented a new presentation style for a searching tool where matches are ordered according to the context of the use. By searching for all instances of a given type or of a set of similar data structures, the view can also help a programmer restructure or encapsulate a class by noting all the operations performed upon instances of that class. This paper introduces the concept of collating syntactic search results according to the context of each use, details the implementation of such a view, demonstrates its implementation in IBM's Visual Age C++ 4.0 programming environment, and presents some initial user feedback