Undecidability of static analysis

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Undecidability of static analysis

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ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS) archive
Volume 1 , Issue 4 (December 1992) table of contents

Pages: 323 - 337

Year of Publication: 1992

ISSN:1057-4514

Author

William Landi

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 14, Downloads (12 Months): 116, Citation Count: 42

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ABSTRACT

Static analysis of programs is indispensable to any software tool, environment, or system that requires compile-time information about the semantics of programs. With the emergence of languages like C and LISP, static analysis of programs with dynamic storage and recursive data structures has become a field of active research. Such analysis is difficult, and the static-analysis community has recognized the need for simplifying assumptions and approximate solutions. However, even under the common simplifying assumptions, such analyses are harder than previously recognized. Two fundamental static-analysis problems are may alias and must alias. The former is not recursive (is undecidable), and the latter is not recursively enumerable (is uncomputable), even when all paths are executable in the program being analyzed for languages with if statements, loops, dynamic storage, and recursive data structures.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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	Joseph Hummel , Laurie J. Hendren , Alexandru Nicolau, A general data dependence test for dynamic, pointer-based data structures, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.29 n.6, p.218-229, June 1994
	Jyh-shiarn Yur , Barbara G. Ryder , William A. Landi, An incremental flow- and context-sensitive pointer aliasing analysis, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.442-451, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States
	Mooly Sagiv , Thomas Reps , Reinhard Wilhelm, Solving shape-analysis problems in languages with destructive updating, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.20 n.1, p.1-50, Jan. 1998
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	Michael Hind, Pointer analysis: haven't we solved this problem yet?, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.54-61, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
	Mooly Sagiv , Thomas Reps , Reinhard Wilhelm, Solving shape-analysis problems in languages with destructive updating, Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.16-31, January 21-24, 1996, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, United States
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	Barbara G. Ryder , William A. Landi , Philip A. Stocks , Sean Zhang , Rita Altucher, A schema for interprocedural modification side-effect analysis with pointer aliasing, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.23 n.2, p.105-186, March 2001
	Robert Muth , Saumya Debray, On the complexity of flow-sensitive dataflow analyses, Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.67-80, January 19-21, 2000, Boston, MA, USA
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