Dagger: a tool to generate program graphs
Yih-Farn Robin Chen · 1994
Dagger is a tool that generates program graphs to selectively visualize a software structure. The design of dagger achieves a strong degree of language independence by exploiting the duality between a class of entity-relationship databases and attributed directed graphs. This paper describes the C and C++ versions of dagger, which map a selected subset of relationships stored in a program database to a graph specification, decorate the graph with display attributes, and then pass it to layout tools or interactive graph browsers. Dagger takes output from database queries to generate a large variety of interesting program graphs, including header file hierarchy, module binding, and type inheritance graphs. This paper describes the graph generation process surrounding dagger and a sample of tools involved in the process. In particular, we describe how a closure operator works in tandem with dagger to control graph complexity by generating reachability graphs where sub-structures are selec...