How to Identify Class Comment Types? A Multi-language Approach for Class Comment Classification
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Software developers usually inspect class comments to gain knowledge about program behavior, regardless of the programming language they are using. Unfortunately, (i) different programming languages present language-specific code commenting notations and guidelines; and (ii) the source code of software projects often lacks comments that adequately describe the class behavior, which complicates program comprehension and evolution activities.
To handle these challenges, this paper investigates the different language-specific class commenting practices of three programming languages: Python, Java, and Smalltalk. Our results confirm that our approach can classify frequent class comment information types with high accuracy for the Python, Java, and Smalltalk programming languages. We believe this work can help in monitoring and assessing the quality and evolution of code comments in different programming languages, and thus support maintenance and evolution tasks.