A Step Towards Automatic Documentation
*Visiting Scientist on leave from Schlumberger-Doll Research. The views and conclusions contained in this paper are those of the author, and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
Working Paper
This paper describes a system which automatically generates program documentation. Starting with a plan generated by analyzing the program, the system computes several kinds of summary information about the program. The most notable are: a summary of the cliched computations performed by the loops in the program, and a summary of the types and uses of the arguments to the program. Based on this information, a few English sentences are produced describing each function analysed.