A Language - Independent Approach to Detection of Near - Miss Clones

Previous research shows that most software systems contain significant amounts of duplicated, or cloned, code. Some clones are exact duplicates of each other, while others differ in small details only. We designate these almost-perfect clones " near-miss " clones. Detection of near-miss clones has many benefits, both academic and practical. Finding these clones can give us better insight into the way developers maintain and reuse code; we can also try to remove near-miss clones in an effort to reduce overall source code size and decrease system complexity. This paper presents a simple and effective way to detect near-miss clones, and shows the results of its application to several pieces of software. We use lexical comparison tools coupled with language-specific extractors to locate clones. Our approach separates code comparisons from code understanding, and makes the comparisons language independent. This makes it easy to adapt to different programming languages.