An Experiment in Scientific Program Understanding




This paper concerns a procedure that 
analyzes aspects of the meaning or semantics 
of scientific and engineering code. This procedure 
involves taking a user's existing code, adding 
semantic declarations for some primitive variables, and 
parsing this annotated code using multiple, independent 
expert parsers. These semantic parsers encode domain 
knowledge and recognize formulae in different disciplines 
including physics, numerical methods, mathematics, and geometry. 
The parsers will automatically recognize and document 
some static, semantic concepts and help locate 
some program semantic errors. Results are shown 
for three intensively studied codes and seven 
blind test cases; all test cases are 
state of the art scientific codes. These 
techniques may apply to a wider range 
of scientific codes. If so, the techniques 
could reduce the time, risk, and effort 
required to develop and modify scientific codes.