Applying Information Flow to Program Comprehension

Information flow describes the ways that information from one part of a program influences other parts of 3 a program. Information flow has traditionally been used for analyzing the security of programs, but here I 4 propose to repurpose it for program comprehension. I show a variety of prototype IDE extensions that could 5 facilitate comprehension, such as defocusing parts of the program irrelevant to the user’s task (i.e. program 6 slicing) and automatically identifying all the observable effects of a function.