Static slicing in the presence of goto statements

ABSTRACT

A static program slice is an extract of a program which can help our understanding of the behavior of the program; it has been proposed for use in debugging, optimization, parallelization, and integration of programs. This article considers two types of static slices: executable and nonexecutable. Efficient and well-founded methods have been developed to construct executable slices for programs without goto statements; it would be tempting to assume these methods would apply as well in programs with arbitrary goto statements. We show why previous methods do not work in this more general setting, and describe our solutions that correctly and efficiently compute executable slices for programs even with arbitrary goto statements. Our conclusion is that goto statements can be accommodated in generating executable static slices.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hiralal Agrawal, On slicing programs with jump statements, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.302-312, June 20-24, 1994, Orlando, Florida, United States
• 2: Hiralal Agrawal , Joseph R. Horgan, Dynamic program slicing, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.25 n.6, p.246-256, Jun. 1990
• 3: Thomas Ball , Susan Horwitz, Slicing Programs with Arbitrary Control-flow, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Automated and Algorithmic Debugging, p.206-222, May 03-05, 1993
• 4: Jong-Deok Choi , Barton P. Miller , Robert H. B. Netzer, Techniques for debugging parallel programs with flowback analysis, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.13 n.4, p.491-530, Oct. 1991 [doi>10.1145/115372.115324]
• 5: Ron Cytron , Jeanne Ferrante , Barry K. Rosen , Mark N. Wegman , F. Kenneth Zadeck, Efficiently computing static single assignment form and the control dependence graph, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.13 n.4, p.451-490, Oct. 1991 [doi>10.1145/115372.115320]
• 6: Jeanne Ferrante , Karl J. Ottenstein , Joe D. Warren, The program dependence graph and its use in optimization, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.9 n.3, p.319-349, July 1987 [doi>10.1145/24039.24041]
• 7: Keith Brian Gallagher, Using program slicing in software maintenance, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Catonsville, MD, 1990
• 8: D Harel, A linear algorithm for finding dominators in flow graphs and related problems, Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.185-194, May 06-08, 1985, Providence, Rhode Island, United States [doi>10.1145/22145.22166]
• 9: Susan Horwitz , Jan Prins , Thomas Reps, Integrating noninterfering versions of programs, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.11 n.3, p.345-387, July 1989 [doi>10.1145/65979.65980]
• 10: Susan Horwitz , Thomas Reps , David Binkley, Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.12 n.1, p.26-60, Jan. 1990 [doi>10.1145/77606.77608]
• 11: B. Korel , J. Laski, Dynamic program slicing, Information Processing Letters, v.29 n.3, p.155-163, October 26, 1988 [doi>10.1016/0020-0190(88)90054-3]
• 12: D. J. Kuck , R. H. Kuhn , D. A. Padua , B. Leasure , M. Wolfe, Dependence graphs and compiler optimizations, Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.207-218, January 26-28, 1981, Williamsburg, Virginia [doi>10.1145/567532.567555]
• 13: James Robert Lyle, Evaluating variations on program slicing for debugging (data-flow, ada), 1984
• 14: Karl J. Ottenstein , Linda M. Ottenstein, The program dependence graph in a software development environment, Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments, p.177-184, April 1984
• 15: Thomas W. Reps , Wuu Yang, The Semantics of Program Slicing and Program Integration, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software Development, Volume 2: Advanced Seminar on Foundations of Innovative Software Development II and Colloquium on Current Issues in Programming Languages, p.360-374, March 13-17, 1989
• 16: Vivek Sarkar, PTRAN—the IBM parallel translation system, Parallel functional languages and compilers, ACM Press, New York, NY, 1991 [doi>10.1145/107214.129260]
• 17: WEISER, M. 1984. Program slicing. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. SE(10), 4,352-357.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Debugging aids

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

General Terms:
Algorithms, Languages

Keywords:
debugging, program analysis, slicing, testing