Abstract
Program slicing is a useful technique for debugging, testing, and analyzing programs. A program slice consists of the parts of a program which (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest. With rare exceptions, program slices have hitherto been computed and defined in ad-hoc and language-specific ways. The principal contribution of this paper is to show that general and semantically well-founded notions of slicing and dependence can be derived in a simple, uniform way from term rewriting systems (TRSs). Our slicing technique is applicable to any language whose semantics is specified in TRS form. Moreover, we show that our method admits an efficient implementation.
Supported in part by the European Union under Esprit project # 5399 (Compiler Generation for Parallel Machines—Compare). Part of this work was done when the second author was at IBM.
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Field, J., Tip, F. (1994). Dynamic dependence in term rewriting systems and its application to program slicing. In: Hermenegildo, M., Penjam, J. (eds) Programming Language Implementation and Logic Programming. PLILP 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 844. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58402-1_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58402-1_29
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