
Ask HN: Devs, what does “search engine for code” mean to you? - JabavuAdams
What do you use now? What would you like to be able to do, but can&#x27;t?
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bediger4000
Sounds like a buzzword to me.

Now, if someone implemented an index of code that was based on something like
Brenda S. Baker's "On Finding Duplication and Near-Duplication in Large
Software Systems ",
[https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.133...](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.133.6440),
maybe that would be interesting.

I believe Baker's work only did C source code, you'd have to have different
parsers for different languages to redo her "dupe" program for a useful
"search engine for code", but it would be valuable.

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bediger4000
Brenda Baker's "Parameterized Pattern Matching"
[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227487](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227487)
appears to be a precursor to the "On Finding Duplication..." paper.

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billconan
a search engine for a single project, or for multiple projects?

I use opengrok and the grep command.

I want fuzzy matching, as sometimes, I don't know the exact spelling.

