APPARATUS FOR VISULIZING PROGRAM SLICES

摘要

Apparatus for visualizing slices of transitive closures of entities having d ependence relationships with one another. A preferred embodiment visualizes slices of programs. A display in a computer system includes reduced representations of thefiles, procedures, and lines making up a program. Th e user employs a pointing device to interactively select a reduced representation as the slice point a nd the apparatus computes the slice and changes the color of the reduced representa tions in the slice. The color of the reduced representation indicates the distance of the entity represented by the reduced representation from the slice point. The display may be rearranged so that files and procedures are ordered by distance from the sli ce point. Other aspects of the display include scaling the size of the reduced represe ntation of a procedure to indicate the number of lines in the procedure and filling the reduced representation of the procedure according to the number of lines belonging t o the slice which are contained in the procedure. A user may select open and close d representations of procedures. The open representation of a procedure contai ns reduced representations of the lines in the procedure. The apparatus also in cludes a viewer for viewing the text of lines in the program.