Dynamic slicing: a generic analysis based on a natural semantics format

• Published in: Journal of logic and computation Vol. 9; no. 6; pp. 835 - 871
• Main Authors: Gouranton, V, Le Métayer, D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 01-12-1999; Oxford Publishing Limited (England); Oxford University Press (OUP)
• Subjects: Computer Science; correctness; Dynamic slicing analysis; natural semantics; Programming Languages; proof tree; Semantics; Symbolic Computation; systematic derivation
• ISSN: 0955-792X; 1465-363X
• DOI: 10.1093/logcom/9.6.835

Slicing analyses have been proposed for different programming languages. Rather than defining a new analysis from scratch for each programming language, we would like to specify such an analysis once and for all, in a language-independent way, and then specialize it for different programming languages. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a notion of natural semantics format and a dynamic slicing analysis format. The natural semantics format formalizes a class of natural semantics and the analysis format is a generic, language-independent, slicing analysis. The correctness of the generic analysis is established as a relation between the derivation trees of the original program and the slice. This generic analysis is then instantiated to several programming languages conforming to the semantics format (an imperative language, a logic programming language and a functional language), yielding a dynamic slicing analyzer for each of these languages.