Who's idea is it anyway?

I started with the research for my thesis proposal this week. For those who
wonder about the subject: please read on. For everybody else: skip to the next paragraph. My master thesis will explore an idea of Johan Jeuring
and Harrie Passier. The eventual goal is to provide feedback in educational tools (well actually educational tools that allow you to rewrite a certain input step by step to an answer), as if the feedback comes from a teacher. One of the hurdles that has to be taken is the guessing of which step the student wanted to take when a faulty answer is inserted in the program.
The idea for guessing this step is that you take the last correct tree and then generates all the trees that can be obtained by rewrite-rules that are allowed. You then calculate the difference between these trees and the faulty answer to find out which tree is nearest to the faulty answer. The rewrite-rule used to get this nearest tree is probably the rule that the student wanted to apply.
This simple and short explanation does not expose all the problems very well, but I will probably come back to that in a later blog. For more information about the idea you can take a look at this paper.

Last Monday I was in Leusden to meet the people from 'TeamInternet' again. Apart from going through some new code of the scoutshop, I also showed PHP-Sat to the people there. Bjarni van Berkum came up with a new idea for a bugpattern and this resulted in another idea. He told me that he was interested in the results of PHP-Sat on the code base because it would probably find the first pattern a few times. I told him that it shouldn't be hard to implement, but it turns out that this is not completely true.
I was right about the fact that it is easy to implement, for normal and static function calls that is. The retrieving of these functions are pretty straightforward because they are directly available in the environment. The problems lays in the fact that most of the codebase of TI is ObjectOriented, which means that there are lots of objects passed to lots of functions. But we currently do not descent into functions, nor do we know about objects. This poses somewhat of a problem if you want to find out which objects are used within functions. So unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done in order to support this.

But there where more ideas that came from people at TI. Frits Zwegers talked about an idea for a tool that can give an overview of which files are needed for a given file. This can be done by collecting all directly included files and all the files that declare a class or a function that is used within the file. The implementation of this tool is also delayed because of the problem mentioned above, but I am pretty sure that it will be available some day :)

The people mentioned above already came up with great ideas, so if you also have a great idea: share it!