Intensions are a Key to Program Comprehension

The classical comprehension theories study relations between extensions, intensions, and names. Originally developed in linguistics and mathematics, these theories are applicable to program comprehension as well. While extensions are present in the program, the intensions are usually missing, and evolution and maintenance programmers have to recover them as the program cannot be successfully comprehended and changed without them. There are six fundamental processes of comprehension and they have several attributes that generate a large set of comprehension processes. One of these processes is concept location, which is a practical and theoretically interesting problem of program comprehension. Despite the current divergence among program comprehension processes, there is still a possibility that a universal program comprehension process will emerge sometime in the future.