What is a Good Open Source Code Analysis Tool?

carlmenezes asks: "I volunteer when I can to help a poor educational institution in India with their computing needs. As you can imagine, most computers are from donations and very little money (if any) can be spent on software licensing. Therefore, the installed software is all Open Source and I do all of the software installation by myself. I have already installed Linux on 16 PCs, with Firefox. The default desktop is KDE and the kdeedu package (klettres in particular) has several loyal fans. Incidentally, the kids don't find it hard to use at all and the lack of 3D doesn't bother them in the least :) I would like to ask the community about a good source code analysis tool. I have already installed Source Navigator. Is there any other comparable open source tool?" "The analysis tools would be for those students that show more interest than the others in programming. There is a lot of source code in there for them to look at it if they want to. I'm looking more at C/C++ than anything else. There are some very bright students and I would like them to be able to move beyond ordinary school programming if they feel like it. No, there is no Internet connection. I bring in the software on CDs and install it."

Comments

myer

[biryokumaru]

myer:

http://home.comcast.net/~jyavner/myer/

Re:Cscope, Lint

[carlmenezes]

Thanks! CScope is something like what I had in mind. I definitely will check it out this weekend. Also came across CBrowser (the front end to CScope), but then cscope is built into vi, which is the most popular console based text editor here :)

Splint is already installed. What I would like to do is to show the tool to those that are interested, give them a short lesson on it and then leave them to their own devices and let their curiosity make them learn.

Re:gcc -Wall

[MrResistor]

That seems like the best way to me as well. It's always better to learn to do something "by hand" first, then bring in the automation later to speed things up (and not just in academic subjects like programming either, as I learned while designing and building custom industrial robots a few jobs ago).

Anyway, slightly OT, but I haven't been that impressed with kdeedu. It feels very much like an open source project to me (in the negative sense), or at least what comes with Suse 9.1 does anyway. I like gcompris much better.

In fact, I like gcompris better than any of the commercial apps I've looked at, all of which are very insipid in the "baby talk" kinda way. Gcompris treats the child like an intelligent human being, which is very important IMO. I've always tried to treat my daughter that way, and as a result her vocabulary often gets her mistaken for being 1-3 years older than she is.

I'm sure that, like the rest of KDE, kdeedu is progressing very quickly. Still, I highly recommend gcompris to anyone who wants some high quality educational software for their child.

Burn Heretic!!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Begone foul troll!! Java is the work of the devil!! And eclipse is its dark whore, complete with multiple blasphemous plugins! Repent! Install perl and ye may yet be saved. Turn back now from the dark path of restricted languages and walk the path of the true believers.

In short, I disagree that Java is easier to teach to beginners. Not only must they immendiatly grasp object orientation and functions, they must also work with Java's quite restrictive language constructs. I do agree that C++ is not a very good languages for beginners. C maybe, with some STL added. I would still be of the opinion that beginners are best starting off with BASIC or perl(without mentioning regular expressions). They need a language that starts very simple so they can wrap ther heads around programming and start spitting out a few programs, without getting bogged down by advanced concepts.