Detecting clones across multiple programming languages is on the cutting edge of research.

A preliminary version of this was done by Dr. Kraft and his students for C# and VB.◦ They compared the Mono C# parser (written in C#) to the

Mono VB parser (written in VB).◦ Publication:

Nicholas A. Kraft, Brandon W. Bonds, Randy K. Smith: Cross-language Clone Detection. SEKE 2008: 54-59

Clone Research

Token sequence of CodeDOM graphs with Levenshtein distance◦ The Levenshtein distance between two sequences is

defined as the minimum number of edits needed to transform one sequence into the other

Performs Comparisons of code files CodeDOM tree is tokenized Based on Distances

◦ Percentage of matching tokens in a sequence

Dr. Kraft Approach

Dr. Kraft Approach (cont)

◦About 50% complete porting the analysis code

◦Dr. Kraft's code AST, codeDOM and Tokenization's are

woven tightly together

Porting Clone Analysis

Only does file-to-file comparisons◦ Does not detect clones in same source file

Can only detect Type 1 and some Type 2 clones

Not very efficient (brute force)

Limitations

User Interface