While the Browser is used to navigate through the entire project, the Viewer can be used to navigate in a single source file. The Viewer comes equipped with enhanced versions of the Emacs and vi editors that provide hyperlinks between source code files and associated documentation. The Decorated Source option highlights syntactic entities in the viewer, such as macros and keywords. It also provides a mini-Browser of its own for rapid navigation. The critical step that derives abstractions from the raw data is analysis.
Software engineers use the resultant information to further understand the system.
There are many forms of analysis possible, such as computing metrics or slicing. The type of analysis supported is closely related to the abstraction level provided by the pattern recognition capabilities of the tool. The more abstract forms entail additional syntactic and semantic analysis that corresponds more to the meaning and behavior of the code and less to its form and structure. Different levels of analysis are necessary for different users and different reverse engineering activities. Mixed-mode execution of interpreted and compiled code enables considerable runtime analysis to be performed quickly and easily.