Multilingual Detection of Code Clones Using ANTLR Grammar Definitions
Yuichi Semura, Norihiro Yoshida, Eunjong Choi, Katsuro Inoue · 2018
So far, many tools have been developed for the detection of code clones in source code. The existing clone detection tools support only a limited number of programming languages and do not provide any easy extension mechanism to handle additional language. However, from our experience in industry/university collaboration, we found that many practitioners need to analyze source code written in various languages. In this paper, we propose an approach for the multilingual detection of code clones using grammar files for a parser generator ANTLR. We extended a clone detection tool CCFinderSW with the proposed approach and then apply the extended CCFinderSW to ANTLR grammar files for 43 languages. As a result, the files for 39 out of the 43 languages can be analyzed correctly by the extended CCFinderSW.