Modelling programs by the notion of hypergraph

Abstract

Programs can be modelled by hypergraphs where the nodes of the hypergraph represent programming units, such as statements or operands/operators, and the edges contain units which are related to each other. This approach gives new insights into the measurement of programs, either by the fact that the well known measures of lines of code, cyclomatic complexity and program length in software science are part of this model, or by definition of a new measure based on the number of cycles in a hypergraph.