PyReprism: A Shared Lexical Foundation for Polyglot Code Analysis

Daniel Ogenrwot, Jorge Gonzalo Delgado Cervantes, Richard Sserunjogi, John Businge

Empirical studies of polyglot repositories apply the same analyses to every language of a corpus, such as separating code from comments, computing metrics, normalizing identifiers, and screening for duplicated code. Assembling them from specialized tools introduces differences in language coverage, measurement conventions, and workflows. We present PYREPRISM, an open-source Python library and command-line tool that separates language-specific lexical processing from reusable analyses: each language declares its lexical surface, which yields a lossless stream of typed tokens, and every analysis is implemented once on that stream. Across 187 built-in languages, language-specific declarations have a median length of 16 lines, and no language overrides a shared analysis. Against a reference parser, comment and string classification reach F1 scores of 0.994 and 0.958 on 1,412 files in 12 languages that were never used to develop the tokenizer. In a study of a polyglot repository, one tool replaces three; with matched inputs and analysis operations, it takes 2.9s instead of 8.7s on one core. We also characterize where lexical analysis falls short, in complexity estimation and clone…