Dynamic Slicing in the Presence of Unconstrained Pointers

Program slices are useful in debugging. Most work on program slicing to date has concentrated on nding slices of programs involving only scalar variables. Pointers and composite variables do not lend themselves well to static analysis, especially when the language involved is not strongly-typed. When debugging a program, however, we are interested in analyzing the program behavior for testcases that reveal a fault. In this paper, we present a uniform approach to handling pointers and composite variables such as arrays, records, and unions for the purpose of obtaining dynamic program slices. The dynamic approach proposed works well even when the language involved allows unconstrained pointers and performs no runtime checks, as in C.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Hiralal Agrawal, Richard A. DeMillo, Eugene H. Spafford
• Keywords: Composite Variables, ISSTA 1991, Program Slices, Scalar Variables, Software Engineering