Simple and Efficient Relational Querying of Software Structures

Many analyses of software systems can be formalized as relational queries, for example the detection of design patterns, of patterns of problematic design, of code clones, of dead code, and of differences between the as-built and the as-designed architecture. This paper describes the concepts of CrocoPat, a tool for querying and manipulating relations. CrocoPat is easy to use, because of its simple query and manipulation language based on predicate calculus, and its simple file format for relations. CrocoPat is efficient, because it internally represents relations as binary decision diagrams, a data structure that is well-known as a compact representation of large relations in computer-aided verification. CrocoPat is general, because it manipulates not only graphs (i.e. binary relations), but n-ary relations.