Abschlussarbeit

Abstract:

Natural languages provide anaphora. Anaphora is a means of reference within a text that can enable a so-called anaphor to draw some of its meaning from a so-called antecedent mentioned earlier in the text.

Certain kinds of anaphora can shorten a text while retaining its coherence (the meaningful connection of the elements the text is made up of).

This bachelor thesis introduces forms of anaphora occuring in natural language, seeks to identify existing anaphora in programming languages and compares both. In turn a transfer of further anaphora known from natural languages to programming languages is attempted in order to try to transfer the positive effects they have in natural languages to programming languages. The transfer will also include a delineation of the differences between natural languages and programming languages. A subset of the proposed anaphora will be implemented in a prototype based on the JastAdd Java compiler. The final evaluation of the introduced anaphora and their prototypical implementation will, besides other aspects, discuss whether the new means of anaphora simplify or complicate changing software.