Planned intervention: On Wednesday April 3rd 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for up to 2-10 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published February 28, 2022 | Version v1
Dataset Open

Understanding Digits in Identifier Names: An Exploratory Study

  • 1. Rochester Institute of Technology

Description

This is the dataset that accompanies the study: "Understanding Digits in Identifier Names: An Exploratory Study." This study has been accepted for publication at: The 1st International Workshop on Natural Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE 2022).

 

Following is the abstract of the study:

Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, high-quality identifier names are essential for productive program comprehension and maintenance activities. With developers free to construct identifier names to their liking, it can be difficult to automatically reason about the quality and semantics behind an identifier name. Studying the structure of identifier names can help alleviate this problem. Existing research focuses on studying words within identifiers, but there are other symbols that appear in identifier names-- such as digits. This paper explores the presence and purpose of digits in identifier names through an empirical study of 800 open-source Java systems. We study how digits contribute to the semantics of identifier names and how identifier names that contain digits evolve over time through renaming. We envision our findings improving the efficiency of name appraisal and recommendation tools and techniques.

 

Notes

This study is part of the work conducted by the Source Code Analysis And Natural Language Laboratory. For more information about what we do and to download the preprint of this study, visit: https://scanl.org/

Files

ReadMe.txt

Files (2.1 GB)

Name Size Download all
md5:88edf55f2f11645ac6e1286449230cea
2.1 GB Download
md5:609e84173903578149ac3f1d4d06f515
142.0 kB Download
md5:cb6918ae25df867adc28aeac8aecb5ec
2.9 kB Preview Download