AutoCode: Using Memex-like Trails to Improve Program Comprehension.
Richard Wheeldon, Steve Counsell, Kevin Keenoy · 2003
Introduction In his seminal paper "As We May Think" [1], Vannevar Bush suggested a future machine called a "memex". In doing so, he introduced the world to the concept of linked documents and of the trail - a sequence of linked pages. The concept of trails is well established in the hypertext community and many systems have been built which support their construction [2]. Previous work has described a navigation engine for automatically constructing trails as a means of assisting users browsing Web sites [4]. This navigation engine was further used to provide search and navigation facilities for Javadoc program documentation. If JavaDoc-style program documention, which is derived from source code, can be indexed, it seems logical that the source code itself can be indexed. We have developed a new tool called AutoCode based upon the navigation engine design. AutoCode provides full-text indexing of the java source code and uses a probabilistic best-first algorithm to identify trails i