Oege de Moor, Mathieu Verbaere, Elnar Hajiyev, Pavel Avgustinov, Torbjörn Ekman, Neil Ongkingco, Damien Sereni, Julian Tibble. Keynote Address: .QL for Source Code Analysis. In Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2007), September 30 - October 1, 2007, Paris, France. pages 3-16, IEEE, 2007. [doi]
Many tasks in source code analysis can be viewed as evaluating queries over a relational representation of the code. Here we present an object-oriented query language, named .QL, and demonstrate its use for general navigation, bug finding and enforcing coding conventions. We then focus on the particular problem of specifying metrics as queries.