I'm working on my Master's thesis in Computer Science. Shortly, I am "drawing" a diagram, which is then serialized and from the serialization I generate some source code. So, my question is not about the code of my application, but about the code generated by it. I think we can call it the result of my app.
I want to include an example of what output (source code, although I will also include the intermediary serialization) has my app for a certain input (a diagram). I mention that this would mean many pages, maybe a total of 7-10. Should I include this in the part related to the results or maybe in an appendix? Or is there a more suitable place? Or should I not include anything at all?
Answer
Short answer: put your code in public repo, and cite the repo in your paper.
Long answer: Any academic document you produce is supposed to be readable and useful to your readers. Try to put yourself in a reader's shoes and imagine how you feel reading through a 7-page long autogenerated code? Is is a pleasant or useful experience that you would like to repeat one day?
The modern technology allows us to use much more than just a text on the paper to present our research outputs. Although a short pieces of code may be extremely useful and appropriate in textbooks or some articles, the long code and auto-generated code really does not belong to the paper. It should be kept in a public repository, where it really belong, and used as a working example, which people can download, modify and execute, not just enjoy it aesthetically in a pdf file.
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