Towards reverse engineering of intermediate code for documentation generators

Abstract

We describe the motivation, approach and first experience from reverse engineering Common Intermediate Language (CIL) for the purpose of documentation generation. Instead of parsing source code implemented in different programming languages, we reverse engineer CIL code and thereby enable documentation generation for all programming languages that can be compiled into CIL code. Initial results show that we are able to generate documents in the same quality as compared to directly analyzing source code. To overcome initial shortcomings we introduce additional preprocessing in form of AST refactoring which is not required when analyzing source code.