An Investigation of Procedure and Variable Names as Beacons During Program Comprehension

By Ed Gellenbeck, C. Cook. 1991

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DOBF: A Deobfuscation Pre-Training Objective for Programming Languages (2021, background): “dead code injection), the obfuscation of identifier names—renaming every variable, method and class with uninformative names—is irreversible and has a substantial impact on code comprehension [22, 31, 43].”
Context2Name: A Deep Learning-Based Approach to Infer Natural Variable Names from Usage Contexts (2017, background): “Ideally, a name should capture its semantic function in a program, effectively acting as an abstraction that developers can use to aid their understanding [16].”
Recovering clear, natural identifiers from obfuscated JS names (2017, background): “A central case in point here is the choice of variable names in code: while names don’t a ect program correctness and function, a well-chosen name, well- tting its context of use, can considerably improve the readers’ comprehension [21, 29].”
MISIM: An End-to-End Neural Code Similarity System (2020, background): “For example, assumptions about consistent semantics for global variables and functions may not hold in cases of non-common code-bases or non-standardized global function names [15, 19, 43].”