On detection of gapped code clones using gap locations

It is generally accepted that a code clone is one factor making software maintenance difficult. A code clone is a code portion in source files that is identical or similar to another. Clones are introduced because of various reasons such as reusing code by 'copy-and-paste' and so on. Since developers usually modify the copied-and-pasted code portions, there are gaps between them and the original code portion. We call such code portions including gaps gapped code clones. Several code clone detection methods, which consider such gaps, have been proposed. However, it is costly to detect all gapped code clones. This paper proposes a new method to visualize gapped code clones as if they were actually detected, based on the detection results of conventional code clones. Using the proposed method, the developer can specify target clones efficiently. Moreover, we implement the proposed method in the maintenance support environment and conduct an experimental evaluation.