Robust binding to syntactic elements in a changing code
Mikhail Malevannyy, Stanislav Mikhalkovich · 2016
In modern Integrated Development Environments and development tools there is a functionality, which requires saving a binding to some code fragments in order to provide an ability to quickly navigate to these fragments and modify them. Most tools enable this kind of navigation only for one programming language and save minimum information, that is enough to perform a jump to the code fragment. The paper describes a model of a binding to the code, which is aimed to work with different languages and to support robust binding even if the code was modified. We provide a description of data being saved, which specifies a certain code fragments as well as algorithms, which use the data to find the location of the code fragments. The analysis of the tool based on the model on two large software projects proves that the model provides robust enough binding to the source code.