Paster: A Copy-and-Paste Programming Assistant for Adapting API Example Code

• Main Authors: Hsing-YaWu, 吳興亞
• Other Authors: Hewijin Christine Jiau
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05090426395966967620

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電腦與通信工程研究所 === 101 === When programming with application programming interface (API), developers often use API code example to reduce the implementation effort. In practice, opportunistic programming that emphasizes speed and ease of development over code robustness and maintainability is widely used to reuse API code example. However, developers often adapt the API example code opportunistically by pasting the example code into developing code and modify the pasted code tediously without knowing the concerns of the adaptation. If the concerns are ignored, it is easy to introduce hidden bug and will lead developers to spend more effort on understanding the code example. In this thesis, I propose a tool, Paster, to handle the concerns when the API example code is being integrated into developing code. An experiment is conducted with three adaptations of representative code examples. The results show that Paster can indicate all defined adaptation problems with only highlighting 15.6%-23.1% of the pasted codes. Up to 61.9%-77.8% of the highlighted codes indeed need modifications which are suggested by Paster. These results show that Paster can reduce the effort when developers adapt API example code by copy-and-paste.